The Trust’s interventions in Higher Education have historically drawn on the recommendations made in the Strategic Plans 2000 and 2006 and the Education Review of April 2005. Over the past seven years, the Trust’s disbursements towards Higher Education have averaged about 20% of the total disbursals made within the entire Education portfolio. The Education review report noted that there has been very little support to Higher Education initiatives in the Undergraduate sector or in the traditional Universities; and these institutional spaces are critical for reviving the higher education sector. Subsequently, in February 2006, through the Trust’s support, the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, organized a workshop on higher education, in collaboration with the Bangalore University, titled ‘The Future of Higher Education in India’. Amongst other things, the workshop sought clarity on the nature of transformation taking place in the field of higher education, including the functioning of institutions, the formulation of policies, the hierarchization of disciplines, and the modes of financing and revenue, besides seeking to understand the conceptual underpinning of the national system of education and the globalized system of the knowledge industry. Subsequently, the Trust commissioned a detailed review of higher education that was anchored by CSCS. The key recommendations of this Strategy Paper were to:

• Undertake measures to re-connect the three ends of the Higher Education spectrum: research centre, university, and college, for example, through fellowship programmes and enhancing library resources;
• Focus on under - graduate education through curriculum development and teacher training as a way of energising the disciplines;
• Revitalize key disciplines like Political Science, Women’s Studies and Sociology which could cut across the social sciences, and help think through larger social issues;
• Support initiatives for developing teaching / study material in regional languages;
• Provide support for libraries, digitalization and building academic resources within and across institutions

In 2007, the Trust operationalised the Higher Education Cell, housed at CSCS in Bangalore which focuses on: (a) Research in Education; (b) technical support and idea incubation for the Trust and the sector at large; and (c) Institutional Collaboration and Archiving.

Ongoing projects within the sub-theme are:

Building Resource in Women’s Studies
This is a three year project being executed by the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata. As the leading Centre in Eastern India, the School was nominated by the UGC as a resource and nodal centre for the eastern region as a whole in the field of Women’s Studies. The School focuses its efforts on developing a strong academic centre of teaching and learning, generating new thinking and knowledge on feminist theory and offering a degree course in Women’s Studies (WS). The Trust’s grant is envisaged to make a one-time three-layer support available to the School of Women’s Studies, Jadavpur University, in order to: (1) enhance the existing M.Phil and Ph.D programmes through field and library scholarships and internships, which will significantly revitalize the School’s in-house academic programmes; (2) create networks and dissemination mechanisms between Women’s Studies Centres (WSC) through National Visiting Fellowships and WS workshops; and (3) establish the programme on a national level through one major National Workshop on Curriculum Building and three readers on WS curricula in English and Bengali.