Higher Education in India
The spread of education in society is at the foundation of success in countries that are latecomers to development. In the quest for development, primary education is absolutely essential because it creates the base. But higher education is just as important, for it provides the cutting edge. And universities are the life-blood of higher education. Islands of excellence in professional education, such as Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and valuable complements but cannot be substitutes for universities which provide educational opportunities for people at large.
There can be no doubt that higher education has made a significant contribution to economic development, social progress and political democracy in independent India. It is a source of dynamism for the economy. It has created social opportunities for people. It has fostered the vibrant democracy in our polity. It has provided a beginning for the creation of knowledge society. But it would be a mistake to focus on its strengths alone. It has weaknesses that are a cause for serious concern.
There is, in fact, a quiet crisis in higher education in India that runs deep. It is not yet discernible simply because there are pockets of excellence, an enormous reservoir of talented young people and an intense competition in the admissions process. And, in some important spheres, we continue to reap the benefits of what was sown in higher education 50 years ago by the founding father of the Republic. The reality is that we have miles to go. The proportion of our population, in the age group 18–24, that enters the world of higher education is around 7 percent, which is only one-half the average for Asia. The opportunities for higher education in terms of the number of places in universities, are simply not enough in relation to our needs. What is more, the quality of higher education in most of our universities requires substantial improvement.
It is clear that the system of higher education in India faces serious challenges. It needs a systematic overhaul, so that we can educate much larger number without diluting academic standards. This is imperative because the transformation of economy and society in the 21st century would depend, in significant part, on the spread and the quality of education among our people, particularly in the sphere of higher education. It is only an inclusive society that can provide the foundations for a knowledge society.
The challenges that confront higher education in India are clear. It needs a massive expansion of opportunities for higher education, to 1500 universities nationwide, that would enable India to attain a gross enrolment ratio of at least 15 percent by 2015. It is just as important to raise the average quality of higher education in every sphere. At the same time, it is essential to create institutions that are exemplars of excellence at par with the best in the world. In the pursuit of these objectives, providing people with access to higher education in a socially inclusive manner is imperative. The realization of these objectives, combined with access, would not only develop the skills and capabilities we need for the economy but would also help transform India into a knowledge economy and society.
The principal focus of the passage is:
Show Hint
- Primary education
- Intermediate education
- Higher education
- Entire education system
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
The style of the passage can be best described as:
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- Academic
- Critical and analytical
- Comparative
- None of the above
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
What kind of society can provide the foundation for a knowledge society?
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- Elite society
- Contracted society
- Exclusive society
- Inclusive society
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
According to the passage, which one of the following is INCORRECT?
Show Hint
- There are no quality institutes providing excellent professional education in India
- Not many people go for higher education in India
- Education is the basis of success
- All the above options are correct
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
According to the passage, the current state of affairs of higher education in India is:
Show Hint
- Satisfactory
- Excellent, and there is no need of any expansion of opportunities for higher education
- Not good enough, and there is a need of expansion of opportunities for higher education, besides creating institutions and universities that are models of excellence
- Not explained in the passage
The Correct Option is C
Solution and Explanation
According to the passage, which of the following is NOT a challenge that confronts higher education in India?
Show Hint
- Expanding opportunities for higher education
- Creating institutions and universities that are exemplars of excellence
- Substantial improvement in the quality of higher education in most of our universities
- Getting into World University Rankings
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
According to the passage, which of the following is CORRECT?
Show Hint
- Primary education is very important
- Universities are the life-blood of higher education
- Transformation of economy and society in the 21st century would depend, in significant part, on the spread and quality of higher education
- All the above propositions are correct
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
Should the entire university system in India be modeled on premier institutes, such as IITs and IIMs, providing professional education?
Show Hint
- Yes
- For sure
- No
- The passage is silent on this question
The Correct Option is D
Solution and Explanation
What is the antonym of the expression ‘cutting edge’?
Show Hint
- Conventional
- Avant-garde
- Advanced
- Contemporary
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
What is the meaning of the word ‘discernible’?
Show Hint
- Unobtrusive
- Noticeable
- Unremarkable
- Inconspicuous
The Correct Option is B
Solution and Explanation
Top Questions on Reading Comprehension
- Acrucial moderating factor in how people experience comparisons is self-esteem. Individuals with high self-esteem are more likely to interpret upward comparison as informative rather than threatening. They are more resilient in the face of others’ success and more likely to believe they can reach their own goals. In contrast, people with low self-esteem are more prone to interpret comparison as judgment, reinforcing negative self-views and triggering feelings of inadequacy.
This dynamic creates a self-reinforcing loop. People with high self-esteem are less vulnerable to upward comparison, which intensifies those doubts. Those with a secure sense of self are more likely to use comparison as a learning tool. The same external stimulus—a colleague’s achievements, a friend’s popularity—can have radically different effects depending on internal stability.
Self-esteem also influences how people choose their comparison targets. Research has found that individuals often engage in “selective comparison,” seeking out those who confirm their existing beliefs about themselves. This can become a subtle form of self-sabotage. Someone who feels unworthy may subconsciously seek out targets that reinforce that sense, perpetuating a narrative of inferiority. One of the most promising antidotes to social comparison is temporal comparison—evaluating oneself not against others, but against one’s own past. This method has been shown to increase motivation and satisfaction, especially when individuals can see concrete progress. Temporal comparison activates the same reward circuits as social comparison but avoids the threat systems associated with social ranking. It also reinforces agency: individuals focus on what they can control and improve rather than what others control. In therapeutic and coaching settings, temporal comparison is used to help clients build self-efficacy and track growth over time.
Moreover, people who focus on self-improvement rather than social dominance are less likely to fall into cycles of envy or self-pity. They can still use others as inspiration, but they do so without attaching their self-worth to the outcome. This is not to say they never compare—but that they focus on learning, rather than judgment. The most skilful approach to comparison may lie in eliminating it, but in reframing it as feedback. When we interpret comparison as information rather than a verdict, we can ask, “What can I learn from this?” This shift turns comparison into a growth tool. Teachers mentor their students, not as rivals. Psychologists emphasize that the key variable here is mindset.
A fixed mindset sees comparison as a threat. If someone else is better, it means we are worse. A growth mindset sees comparison as a map. If someone else has reached a certain level, it means the path exists. This reframing is not just a cognitive trick. It changes the emotional tone of comparison, making it more likely to inspire than to wound. Reframing also requires emotional regulation—the ability to notice an initial pang of envy or shame without reacting impulsively. With practice, individuals can learn to pause, reflect, and reinterpret their emotional responses. Over time, this builds resilience and self-trust, allowing comparison to become a learning tool rather than a cage.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
When people who are talking don’t share the same culture, knowledge, values, and assumptions, mutual understanding can be especially difficult. Such understanding is possible through the negotiation of meaning. To negotiate meaning with someone, you have to become aware of and respect both the differences in your backgrounds and when these differences are important. You need enough diversity of cultural and personal experience to be aware that divergent world views exist and what they might be like. You also need the flexibility in world view, and a generous tolerance for mistakes, as well as a talent for finding the right metaphor to communicate the relevant parts of unshared experiences or to highlight the shared experiences while demphasizing the others. Metaphorical imagination is a crucial skill in creating rapport and in communicating the nature of unshared experience. This skill consists, in large measure, of the ability to bend your world view and adjust the way you categorize your experiences. Problems of mutual understanding are not exotic; they arise in all extended conversations where understanding is important.
When it really counts, meaning is almost never communicated according to the CONDUIT metaphor, that is, where one person transmits a fixed, clear proposition to another by means of expressions in a common language, where both parties have all the relevant common knowledge, assumptions, values, etc. When the chips are down, meaning is negotiated: you slowly figure out what you have in common, what it is safe to talk about, how you can communicate unshared experience or create a shared vision. With enough flexibility in bending your world view and with luck and charity, you may achieve some mutual understanding.
Communication theories based on the CONDUIT metaphor turn from the pathetic to the evil when they are applied indiscriminately on a large scale, say, in government surveillance or computerized files. There, what is most crucial for real understanding is almost never included, and it is assumed that the words in the file have meaning in themselves—disembodied, objective, understandable meaning. When a society lives by the CONDUITmetaphor on a large scale, misunderstanding, persecution, and much worse are the likely products.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Later, I realized that reviewing the history of nuclear physics served another purpose as well: It gave the lie to the naive belief that the physicists could have come together when nuclear fission was discovered (in Nazi Germany!) and agreed to keep the discovery a secret, thereby sparing humanity such a burden. No. Given the development of nuclear physics up to 1938, development that physicists throughout the world pursued in all innocence of any intention of finding the engine of a new weapon of mass destruction—only one of them, the remarkable Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard, took that possibility seriously—the discovery of nuclear fission was inevitable. To stop it, you would have had to stop physics. If German scientists hadn’t made the discovery when they did, French, American, Russian, Italian, or Danish scientists would have done so, almost certainly within days or weeks. They were all working at the same cutting edge, trying to understand the strange results of a simple experiment bombarding uranium with neutrons. Here was no Faustian bargain, as movie directors and other naifs still find it intellectually challenging to imagine. Here was no evil machinery that the noble scientists might hide from the problems and the generals. To the contrary, there was a high insight into how the world works, an energetic reaction, older than the earth, that science had finally devised the instruments and arrangements to coart forth. “Make it seem inevitable,” Louis Pasteur used to advise his students when they prepared to write up their discoveries. But it was. To wish that it might have been ignored or suppressed is barbarous. “Knowledge,” Niels Bohr once noted, “is itself the basis for civilization.” You cannot have the one without the other; the one depends upon the other. Nor can you have only benevolent knowledge; the scientific method doesn’t filter for benevolence. Knowledge has consequences, not always intended, not always comfortable, but always welcome. The earth revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth. “It is a profound and necessary truth,” Robert Oppenheimer would say, “that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
...Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is “the gradual removal of prejudices.” The discovery that the earth revolves around the sun has gradually removed the prejudice that the earth is the center of the universe. The discovery of microbes is gradually removing the prejudice that disease is a punishment from God. The discovery of evolution is gradually removing the prejudice that Homo sapiens is a separate and special creation.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
As the post–World War II generation of liberal democratic leaders forged new, highly successful domestic and international institutions and policies throughout the West, the weaknesses of liberal democracy that dominated the two decades after World War II faded from view. But they did not go away.
First, because liberal democracy restrains majorities, it slows the achievement of goals that majorities support. This generates frustration with institutional restraints, and an unacknowledged envy of authoritarian systems that can act quickly and decisively. China can build huge cities in the time it takes the United States to review the environmental impact of small highway projects. Liberal democracy requires more patience than many possess. Second, liberal democracy requires tolerance for minority views and ways of life to which many citizens are deeply opposed. It is natural to feel that if we consider certain views or ways of life to be odious, we should use public power to suppress them. In many such cases, liberal democracy restrains this impulse, a psychological burden that some will find unbearable.
This leads directly to the third inherent problem of liberal democracy—the distinction it requires us to make between civic identity and personal or group identity. For example, although we may consider certain religious views false and even dangerous, we must, for civic purposes, accept those who hold these views as our equals. They may freely express these views; they may organize to promote them; they may vote, and their votes are given the same weight as ours. The same goes for race, ethnicity, gender, and all the particularities that distinguish us from one another.
This requirement often goes against the grain of natural sentiments. We want the public sphere to reflect what we find most valuable about our private commitments. Liberal democracy prevents us from fully translating our personal identities into our public lives as citizens. This too is not always easy to bear. The quest for wholeness—for a political community, or even a world, that reflects our most important commitments—is a deep yearning to which liberal leaders can always appeal.
Nor is the fourth inherent difficulty of liberal democracy—the necessity of compromise—easy to bear. If what I want is good and true, why should I agree that public decisions must incorporate competing views? James Madison gives us the answer: in circumstances of liberty, diversity of views is inevitable, and unless those who agree with us form a majority so large as to be irresistible, the alternative to compromise is inaction, which is often more damaging, or oppression, which always is.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Beware of the old newspapers
stacked
on that little three legged stool over there.
Don’t disturb them.
I know it for a fact
that snakes have spawned in between these sheets.
Don’t even look in that direction.
It’s not because of breeze
that their corners are fluttering.
It’s alive, that nest of newspapers.
new born snakes, coiling and uncurling,
are turning their heads to look at you.
That white corner has spread its hood.
A forked tongue
shoots out of its mouth.
Keep your eyes closed.
Get rid of the whole goddamn pile if you
want to
in the morning.- XAT - 2026
- Verbal and Logical Ability
- Reading Comprehension
Questions Asked in CLAT exam
- In a language laboratory, students were given an interesting puzzle involving the word "ELECTROCARDIOGRAPH." The teacher explained that such exercises not only test logical skills but also sharpen attention to detail. According to the challenge, the word had to undergo a series of transformations. First, the class was asked to take the first half of the letters, reverse their order and make the arrangement of letters look quite different from the original. Next, the students were told to identify the last but one letter of the original word and place it at the very beginning, a step that changed the opening appearance of the sequence completely. Finally, as a finishing touch, they had to add the letter 'S' at the end. Following these steps carefully would lead them to the correct transformed word, and only those who adhered to each condition in the exact order could solve the puzzle successfully. (150 words)
- CLAT - 2026
- Coding Decoding
On the night of October 12th, the "Sunburst Medallion" was stolen from the highly secured display case in the city museum. The theft occurred sometime between the museum closing at 10:00 PM and the night guard, Mr. Hemant, completing his final round at 1:00 AM. Three primary suspects were identified, all of whom had recently been dismissed from their museum positions: Anjali, the former curator; Bharat, the former security expert; and Chitra, the former exhibits designer.
Here are the established facts and their alibis:
- The security system logs show that the display case was opened using a specific five-digit code, which only Anjali and the museum director (who was out of the country) knew.
- Bharat's alibi is that he was at a distant relative's birthday party from 8:00 PM to 1:30 AM. Multiple independent witnesses confirmed his presence throughout the entire period.
- Chitra's alibi is that she was working late at a downtown graphic design studio. A time-stamped security camera from the studio's entrance shows her entering at 7:00 PM and exiting at 11:45 PM. The studio is a 20-minute drive from the museum.
- Mr. Hemant, the night guard, stated he checked the medallion at 10:30 PM, and it was still there.
Further investigation revealed that a small, distinctive silver button was found near the display case. Anjali is known to frequently wear a coat with similar unique silver buttons. The security expert, Bharat, had previously boasted that he could remotely disable a certain type of magnetic lock—the same type used on the medallion's case—without needing the code, though the log suggests the code was used. (269 words)
- CLAT - 2026
- Assertion and Reason
In a small town lived a close-knit family where every relation could be expressed through simple symbols. For instance, when they said \( A \times B \), it meant \( A \) is the father of \( B \), while \( A \div B \) meant \( A \) is the mother of \( B \). The younger ones were often introduced with \( A + B \), meaning \( A \) was the daughter of \( B \), and the bond of brotherhood was shown by \( A - B \) (A is brother of B).
One day, the children in the family turned these symbols into a playful code. Instead of introducing their parents and siblings in words, they spoke only in symbols. “Look,” giggled little Meena, “\( M + N \div O \)!” Everyone laughed, because they knew it meant Meena was the daughter of \( N \), and \( N \) was the mother of \( O \), making her \( O \)’s sister. What started as a code soon became a family game, making the bonds of father, mother, daughter, and brother not just relations, but symbols of love and togetherness. (165 words)
- CLAT - 2026
- Blood Relations
Four teams – Red (R), Blue (B), Green (G), and Yellow (Y) – are competing in the final four rounds of the Inter-School Science Olympiad, labeled Round A, Round B, Round C, and Round D. Each round consists of one match between two teams, and every team plays exactly two matches. No team plays the same opponent more than once.
The final schedule must adhere to the following rules:
- Rule 1 (Consecutive Play): The Green team (G) must play their two matches in consecutive rounds.
- Rule 2 (Fixed Appearance): The Yellow team (Y) must play in Round B.
- Rule 3 (Positional Constraint): The Red team (R) must play against the Blue team (B) in a round that is immediately before a round in which neither R nor B is playing.
- Rule 4 (Timing): The Blue team's (B) first match must occur in an earlier round than the Green team's (G) first match.
- Rule 5 (Opponent Link): The team that plays against the Red team (R) in the round that is not against the Blue team (B), is the same team that plays in Round D.
(193 words)
- CLAT - 2026
- Seating Arrangement
Health insurance plays a vital role in ensuring financial protection and access to quality healthcare. In India, however, the extent and nature of health insurance coverage vary significantly between urban and rural areas. While urban populations often have better access to organized insurance schemes, employer-provided coverage, and awareness about health policies, rural populations face challenges such as limited outreach of insurance schemes, inadequate infrastructure, and lower awareness levels. This urban-rural divide in health insurance coverage highlights the broader issue of healthcare inequality, making it essential to analyze the factors contributing to this gap and explore strategies for more inclusive health protection. A state-level health survey was conducted.
The survey covered 1,80,000 adults across urban and rural areas. Urban residents formed 55% of the sample (that is, 99,000 people) while rural residents made up 45% (that is, 81,000 people). In each area, coverage was classified under four heads – Public schemes, Private insurance, Employer-provided coverage, and Uninsured. In urban areas, Public coverage accounted for 28% of the urban population, Private for 22%, Employer for 18%, and the remaining 32% were Uninsured. In rural areas, where formal coverage is generally lower, Public coverage stood at 35%, Private at 10%, Employer at 8%, while 47% were Uninsured.
For this survey, “Insured” includes everyone covered by Public + Private + Employer schemes, and “Uninsured” indicates those with no coverage at all. Officials noted that public schemes remain the backbone of rural coverage, while employer and private plans are relatively more prevalent in urban centres. (250 words)
- CLAT - 2026
- Ratio and Proportion