India will add 800 new universities by 2020

Times Higher Education is reporting that Britain and India’s governments will enter a second phase of their UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), a partnership which involves linking young academics from the two countries together, developing skills capacity in Indian vocational schools and enhancing mobility of qualifications across borders.

But most striking about the announcement was the stated size of India’s higher education ambition. The country plans to boost the number of university students from roughly 13 million today to more than 40 million by 2020. That will require opening 800 new universities. According to the World Bank’s most recent report in 2006, there were  367 universities and 18,000 colleges in India.