Interim Budget 2019: What govt needs to do to boost higher education bodies

India is not investing adequately in its demographic dividend--the world's largest--and its potential will slide further if the government’s last budget before general elections does not acknowledge this fact.

India’s expenditure on higher education as a percentage of its total budget has remained largely stagnant, hovering around an average 1.47% over 12 years to 2018-19. This stagnation accompanies the datum that India has the world's largest population of young people aged 15 to 24, (241 million or 18% of all Indians). India is ahead of China (169.4 million), according to a 2017 report by the United Nations Department of