Diversity & social inclusion in higher education: Reflections from FICCI HES 2017

Abstract

This report from the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education reflects on a FICCI HES 2017 session on diversity and inclusion in Indian higher education. It opens with the scale of the Indian system, nearly 800 universities and forty million students, still marked by uneven access along lines of class, gender, disability, and language. Drawing on speakers including Budd Hall, Darren Lortan, and Rajesh Tandon, it moves through the University of Victoria's indigenization efforts, South Africa's unfinished decolonization of higher education, and arguments that a uniform national curriculum alienates students from their local contexts and knowledge systems. The report treats diversity as reaching beyond enrolment numbers into curricula, pedagogy, and institutional structure and closes by proposing directions for Indian HEIs: mainstreaming marginalised populations, transforming pedagogy, restructuring institutions, and revising curricula to become contextual, framed as necessary to sustaining democratic values through education.