Privatization of Higher Education in India: Concept, Contour’s Relevance and Limitations

India has world‟s third largest higher educational system, next to China and United States. Higher education is a global phenomenon. Higher education system plays pivotal role for the country's overall development including industrial, social, economic, political, etc. Indian higher education system is the second largest in the world after USA. The mission of higher education is to achieve equality, justice, quality, employability, inclusiveness and create a knowledge society. Education is one of the very important indicators of human development that is required for the advancement and promotion of a society. The main function of higher education is to add real value to human resources and produce wealth creators and leaders in all fields like business, professions, politics, administration etc. To tackle with the problem of unavailability of funds, instead of setting up new institutions, which require huge investments, priority of the government is to expand the capacity of existing institutions and to open the new educational institutions in higher education in private sector only. There are three forms of privatization of higher education institutes- Government self financing institutes, Government aided private self-financing institutes and completely private higher education institutes. The need to privatize higher education is explained in this paper. The impact of privatization in higher education is positive as well as negative. It has brought about a rapid change in the educational scenario of India. Privatization encourages the individual and society to establish schools, colleges and private universities to meet the growing demand for education. As a result, private educational institutions are growing day by day throughout the country. Hence, the prime objective of this paper is to present the concept, contour‟s, relevance and limitations e of privatization in present higher education system in India.