New Delhi, Nov. 11 -- Walk into a college on a weekday morning and you will likely find empty classrooms. The students are not there. Quite often, neither are the teachers.

This would be unthinkable in a school, where even parents who never ever learnt to read send their children every day and expect the teacher to show up and teach. In a shockingly large number of our higher education institutions (HEIs), nobody expects anything of anyone.

India's higher education is in worse shape than its school education. We speak endlessly of school failures because learning measures are widely available; for colleges, they are not, so the problem never reaches the public eye and never becomes a central narrative in our efforts at national improvem...