'Enrolment of female students poor in national institutes'

New Delhi: In a startling revelation, it has come to the notice that enrolment of female students is very poor in comparison to make students in the institutions of national importance, which includes premier public higher educational institutions such as IIT, IIMs, NITs, premier medical colleges, etc.

According to the latest report of All India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE), it has come to notice that enrolment of female students is poor not only in the institutions of national importance, though its lesser in state's private open universities, as well as government, deemed universities in comparison to male students.

According to the AISHE report, there are 903 universities, 39,050 colleges and 10,011 standalone institutions listed on AISHE web portal and out of the 882 universities are affiliating, while 343 universities are privately managed and 357 varsities are located in rural areas. Surprisingly, there are only 15 universities, which are only for women in the country.

The report, which was released by Union Minister of Human Resource Development Prakash Javadekar on Friday, said that the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education in the country is 25.8 per cent, which is calculated for 18-23 years of age group.

"The total enrolment in higher education has been estimated to be 36.6 million with 19.2 million boys and 17.4 million girls. The girls constitute 47.6 per cent of the enrolment," said the survey report for 2017-18.

The GER for the male population is 26.3 per cent and for females, it is 25.4 per cent. For Scheduled Castes, it is 21.8 per cent and for Scheduled Tribes, it is 15.9 per cent as compared to the national GER of 25.8 per cent, it said. More males were awarded PhD degrees during 2017, maximum of them being in the science stream.

"A total of 34,000 students were awarded PhD-level degrees during 2017, with 20,179 males and 14,221 females. At PhD-level, a maximum number of students turn out is in the science stream, followed by engineering and technology. On the other hand, at PG-level maximum students turn out is observed in social science followed by management stream," the survey report said.

Uttar Pradesh comes at number one with the highest student enrolment, followed by Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. The total number of foreign students enrolled in higher education is 46,114 and top 10 countries constitute 63.4 per cent of the total foreign students enrolled. The AISHE was initiated in the year 2011 to prepare a robust database on higher education. The report further stated that the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) in universities and colleges is 30, whereas the PTR for universities and its constituent units is 20 for regular mode.

Meanwhile, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar has stressed on increasing the GER from 26 per cent to 40 per cent in the coming years to match with the developed countries.