A University is more than a glorified extension of a school wherein the learned persons congregate to train a younger generation and pass over their knowledge and experience. Ancient India had a number of institutions & teachers whose reputation for knowledge and learning spread far and wide. Takshashila, Nalanda and Kanchipuram are a few of them.

In modern India, according to official statistics, the number of universities, deemed universities and institutions of national importance have risen fivefold in three decades, from 45 in 1961 to 226 in 1996.

But reversal of universities from knowledge and learning sharing centers to degree-producing machines has become a cause of apprehension for the education system.

Founder and President of Rai Foundation, Vinay Rai extends this thought. "The need of the hour is to create an intellectual atmosphere that is conducive to creative work. This would help Indian universities in becoming fountainheads of knowledge like they were in yester years," he says.

As per Shanghai group, research amongst the top 500 universities of the world top 35 are American. After U.S. comes the number of universities from Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia. Only three Indian Institutes have made it to top 500. Not even a single Indian University in conventional sense of terms figures in the rankings. After Independence, a number of autonomous research institutes were set up but none of these had an integral link with a university. Although many of these Institutes had been given 'deemed university' status but the quality of research and its benefits to the students is marginal.

As per the Shanghai group research the ranking of a university is based on following criteria:

1. Number of highly cited researchers employed in the university.

2. Number of people who won Nobel Prize working at the university.

3. Articles published by university staff in leading journals.

4. Average academic output of a faculty member.

Indian universities are not the powerhouses of research they should or could be. Even as the funding has increased for many of UGC's five star universities, the universities in India are limping. There are many problems. One of them is, the long-range goal of training of next generation of researchers has not been taken seriously in the academic bodies of the country's institutes where potential researchers are often viewed as technicians whose exertions served primarily to advance the careers of their supervisors. Even the share of India in 1, 111, 371 papers published in journals around the world is just 2.08%.

The internal debates in the universities invariably focus on politics of administration, & dedicated teachers are rarely recognized by university administrators. This has further deteriorated the output of academic staff.