India's higher education system has a story it loves to tell about itself.

The IITs are world-class. The IIMs produce management talent that runs global corporations. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences trains doctors who staff hospitals from London to Lagos. India's best institutions are genuinely excellent, and the country is right to take pride in them.

Here is the part of the story that doesn't get told as often.

The Scale Problem

The twenty-three IITs in India collectively admit approximately 17,000 undergraduate students per year. The twenty IIMs combined graduate somewhere around 10,000 MBA students annually. Total: roughly 27,000 students going through India's most celebrated institutions each year.

India has 900+ state universities and 40,000+ affiliated colleges. These institutions collectively educate approximately 35 million students — a number that is not a rounding error but a different order of magnitude entirely.

These are the institutions that are chronically underfunded relative to their mandate. Where faculty positions sit vacant for years because of bureaucratic hiring freezes. Where political interference in academic appointments is not an occasional problem but a structural feature. Where research infrastructure is so limited that the concept of a research culture barely exists. Where the curriculum in many cases has not been meaningfully updated in a decade.

What Happens at These Institutions

The students who emerge from India's state university system are, on average, significantly less prepared for the formal economy than they should be. Not because they are less intelligent or less hardworking — they are not — but because the institutions that were supposed to develop their capabilities have systematically failed to do so.

This has consequences that ripple through the entire economy.

India has a peculiar labour market paradox: simultaneously high unemployment (particularly among youth) and chronic skills shortages in growth sectors. Companies can't find the people they need. Graduates can't find the jobs they were promised. The credential has been issued but the capability it was supposed to certify was never fully developed.

This is not an education problem in the narrow sense. It is an economic development problem, a social mobility problem, and ultimately a political stability problem. The young person from a district town who attends a state college, pays fees that represent a significant sacrifice for a working-class family, and emerges with a degree that opens no doors — that person has a legitimate grievance against the system.

The Political Economy of Under-Investment

Why has this continued for so long?

Because the people who make policy in India — the bureaucrats, the ministers, the think tankers — mostly went to the good institutions. Their children go to the good institutions or go abroad. The 35 million students at state universities are politically legible as a vote bank at election time, but their educational outcomes are not a priority that translates into sustained budget pressure.

The IITs get the attention, the funding, the international rankings anxiety, and the alumni networks that advocate for them. The state universities get the neglect.

What Would Change

A sustained increase in per-student funding at state universities. Autonomous hiring authorities that can recruit faculty without going through bureaucratic approval chains that take two years. Curriculum revision processes that are responsive to labour market needs. Genuine research infrastructure at select state institutions — not replicas of the IITs, but serious second-tier research capacity.

None of this is complicated. All of it is achievable. The resources exist in the Indian economy to do this.

What has been missing is the political will to treat 35 million students as an investment rather than a constituency.

The gap between the IITs and everyone else is not where India's potential lives. It is where India's potential goes to die.

That is not a problem for the next government. It is the problem for every government. Including this one.