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Such are the heady claims. Critics, including from the state's main opposition party, see a far different picture. They find the pledge a cover for corrupt dealings, sweetheart deals with the state government, skirting open competitive bidding. There is also a history of criticism of the company on environmental and humanitarian grounds, with a jaundiced eye from the Supreme Court. The site of the proposed campus is said to obey corporate interest more than university rationales. Business-dirty business at that- over academics.

For the full stories (shown with permission), see the Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2006, "Indian Foundation Will Give $1-Billion to Create a Huge Research University," by Samantha Henig; July 25, 2006, "$1-Billion Pledge for Indian University Is Smokescreen for Business Scam, Opposition-Party Leader Claims," by Shailaja Neelakantan.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=dc131nv11tvq6xtm9hmnjld7fpdc961p
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=svzych8sf8c45ws2ncw83zq8zzr7y5pr

PROPHE Observation:

The claims and counter-claims echo many basic elements of private-public debate but with particulars of the case and involving unprecedented money. The United States is by far the leading country for corporate philanthropy and even it has seen no pledge of this size. India has more philanthropic tradition than most countries do, but in fact the role of philanthropy in Indian higher education proportionally diminished in the post-Independence (1947) decades.

The initial debate about Vedanta reflects deep divisions in India. It is unclear how much critics are against the shoddy practices they see in this particular case or also more widely hostile to mixing big private money into the properly public purpose of higher education. Without doubt Indian higher education, like the Indian economy, has undergone huge privatization in the last fifteen years or so. In both the private economy and private higher education, wealthier states have taken the clear lead, as in common in other countries. (Particularly striking in the present case is that Orissa is not such a state, a point that critics see in ways that question the motivation and the feasibility of the project.) Public funding and expansion has been reversed. Indeed, public universities have partly privatized, including with programs that admit students paying substantial fees. Most growth comes in private institutions. These include a range of professional institutes but also universities and institutions "deemed to be universities." The great majority of Indian higher education institutions continue to be "affiliated colleges;" these had mostly become public in finance but now the trend has flipped to the private side.

Among the maladies of Indian higher education is the relative lack of institutional differentiation and appropriate incentives and competition. How much present privatization will help in this respect remains unclear. What is clear is that India has far too few elite universities, public or private, to spur the country's place in the globalized knowledge economy. It is also clear that outside the United States it has been extremely rare for there to be large elite private universities. A series of obstacles has historically impeded such experiments, but today's massive corporate wealth has spurred rumblings, as in Italy. What will result in India generally as well as in the particular case of Vedanta University bears watching.

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