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Unit 30: NUEPA as an Apex Body in Educational Planning and Management

• To organize training, conferences, workshops, meetings, seminars and briefing sessions for Notes
educational personnel of the central and state governments and union territories;
• To offer, on request, consultancy service to governments, including state governments,
educational institutions and institutions/organizations in India and abroad.
The university is fully involved in the capacity building and research in planning and management
of education in not only in India but also in South Asia. Enormous contribution has been made in
the field of education.
30.3 Higher Education and Development

Universities play a crucial role in generating new ideas, and in accumulating and transmitting
knowledge, yet they have remained peripheral to development concerns. Although no longer the
sole generators of knowledge needed for development, through their research and teaching they
help to produce expertise, manage development, engineer social transformation, and preserve social
values and cultural ethos.
Education contributes to the growth of national income and individual earnings. While land was
the main source of wealth and income in agricultural societies, capital and machinery became
important in industrial societies. In today’s information societies, knowledge drives economic growth
and development. Higher education is the main source of that knowledge. Its production,
dissemination and its absorption by any society.
Economic growth currently depends on the capacity to produce knowledge based goods. However,
the future of knowledge economies depends more on their capacity to produce knowledge through
research and development rather than on knowledge-based goods. Hence, knowledge economies
place greater value and accord higher priority to the production and distribution of knowledge.

Higher education institutions are a major source for providing the human capital required
for knowledge production.

Knowledge and inequality
While some countries produce more knowledge than others, they do not have the monopoly thereof.
With information technologies, knowledge transcends national boundaries faster than capital or
people. This makes knowledge economies global, both in their orientation and in the way they
operate.
Today, much knowledge is available at a very low cost, but its accessibility and use depends on the
human capacity to process and absorb it. Even if a country’s capacity to produce knowledge is
weak, its capacity to access and absorb it determines the pace at which that country develops.
Higher education, therefore, plays a crucial role in enhancing a nations human capacity to absorb
and use knowledge.
If knowledge is a source of economic growth, disparities in its distribution become a source of
inequality among nations. Studies show that income inequalities are high where enrolments in
higher education are low. A comparison between developing and developed countries further
illustrates this point. It is argued that low enrolment rates in higher education and high-income
disparities co-exist in the early stages of development in many countries.
The individual benefits of higher education are well known. It ensures better employment, higher
salaries and a greater ability to consume and save. Incomes vary considerably from one profession
to another. What determines these differences in earnings ? Here again, higher education emerges
as an important variable contributing significantly towards improving individual earnings.

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