Indian universities face the problem of talent and money. The garden of higher education in India has been left largely untended for over fifty years. When I have the opportunity to speak at Indian universities, I ask the students: Who would you like to be taught by "people as smart as you, or less so?

The students giggle, smile, even go red in the face, and someone would give the polite answer: We would like to be taught by people smarter than us. The inevitable next question is: How many people in this room filled with young talent plan to take up teaching as their work? Rarely a hand goes up, and if one or two hands do go up gingerly, they elicit derisive laughter, and those hands, too, promptly go down. It is a huge problem in India.

I ask vice-chancellors and deans about the ratio of average compensation for their fresh graduates and teachers and I get a number around three to five in favor of students. The government doesn't have the money and our friends in business think they can make money by delivering higher education. No Indian university stands among the top hundred in the world. Nobody in the world has yet found a way of delivering quality education without large subsidies from either government or business.

There is a widespread misconception in India that quality higher education can be delivered at a profit. How many of the businessmen setting up these shops will send their own children to schools which make profit? Only about 16 percent of my university's revenue comes from student fees. Yale is a private university. In India, people in teaching business seem to earn more than 100 percent of their expenses from student fees.

I suspect the source of this impression in India may be the conception of the essence of higher education being the bricks and mortar, and not the brains. Contrast this with the Vishwa Bharathi concept of higher education where one could sit under a tree and still learn and think of great thoughts. Attracting the best minds of each generation to teaching and scholarship is India's challenge.

I am glad to see that the current government in India is beginning to pay some attention to this long-neglected challenge before the system collapses for the lack of sufficient high quality talent in academia.