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The book The Allure of Battle (2017) by Cathal Nolan argues that while most military history explains winners and losers through decisive battles and strategic genius, what matters is endurance and technology. India’s first National Security Strategy document is being written and will propose accelerating domestic defence production. However, the ongoing Ukraine and Israel conflicts confirm Nolan’s thesis that Shaastra (knowledge) and Shastra (weapons) are siblings; the distinction between civilian and military technology erodes with drones, satellite internet, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and clean energy. We make the case that the strategy must include the goal of 10 universities in the top 100 global university rankings by India@100.

India confronts changing geopolitics. America accelerated China’s global economic integration, but rural and manufacturing American workers without degrees should have shot down the Pakistan Air Force plane that secretly took Henry Kissinger to China for reconciliation talks in 1971. But America has changed its mind; its National Security Advisor aims to hobble China’s capabilities by placing “foundational technologies behind a high fence”. Even “friendshoring” is threatened; the White House Economic Council Director recently suggested that a Japanese company with Chinese operations buying US Steel may impact national security. China is responding by banning Tesla cars and Apple phones from army bases because of sophisticated cameras, mics and cloud backups. Xi Jinping’s dual circulation now “means use Chinese when we can, foreign only if we must”. And Pakistan’s garrison state refuses to abandon their so-called 1,000-year war on India declared by Bhutto 60 years ago despite it poisoning their republic.

American universities have had deep military partnerships; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) contributions to World War II included radars for planes, ships, guns, airports, and the long-range navigation (LORAN) system. Crucial to this partnership was Vannevar Bush, the first dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, who left in 1939 to become chairman of the National Defense Research Committee and the Office of Scientific Research and Development. It’s hardly a coincidence that Bush’s first MIT doctoral student, Frank Terman, long-time dean of Stanford’s engineering school, midwifed Silicon Valley and its deep military connections.

Are global university rankings a helpful goal? The criticism is that they are popularity contests (peer surveys), unreliable (variables are poor proxies for quality), incomplete (teaching quality missing), ideological (one-size fits all), and unequal (top 10 countries account for 60 per cent of top 500). Rankings make value judgements: Valuing learning for living or earning, equating the value of education with the graduate’s salary, and the language of customers in universities. Isn’t it impossible to decide which disciplines matter more: The sciences that lengthen our lives or the humanities that make those longer lives worth living?

But global rankings matter. Among universities, 71 per cent have a ranking goal, 68 per cent use them as a tool for management, and 50 per cent use them for publicity. Indian institutions currently engage with five rankings [NIRF, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), Shanghai, US News, and Times]. Reverse engineering the QS Top 300 universities suggests what matters is size (average 25,000 plus students with 2,600 plus faculty), budgets (the top 100 have $2 billion, double the next 100, triple the next 100), age (youngest is 40 years old), and internationalisation (19 per cent of students). China has 71 universities in the top 500 QS rankings because they began targeting rankings early: 1995 (Project 211 with 100 universities), 1996 (international collaborations), 1998 (Project 985 with nine universities), 2007 (Project 985 expanded to 37 universities), 2009 (C9 league), 2012 (scientific evidence for the impact of international collaboration), 2015 (project double world-class launched when QS methodology changed), 2020 (Chinese government requests move away from citations), and 2022 (double first class).

India’s performance — only 11 in the top 500 — could rapidly improve with five interventions. First, select 20 government universities and overinvest in them (large research offices, industry liaison offices, incentives for extramural funding/marching grants). Second, merge many independent research labs into these top 20 government institutions (Paris Saclay consolidated 19 smaller institutions in 2015 and catapulted to reach Rank 1 in continental Europe and Rank 15 globally in ARWU). Third, scale and concentrate government research funding to universities (America’s $48 billion National Institute of Health and $8.6 billion National Science Foundation give 80 per cent to Universities; 40 universities get more than $250 million each, and all have top global rankings). Fourth, incentivise corporate research at local universities (200 per cent tax deduction for research when at least 25 per cent of the R&D budget is spent at Indian universities). Finally, performance-based funding (Rs 1,000 crore annual fund to grant untied money to departments/institutions with the most significant improvement in research metrics and rankings). India is fertile soil — many IITs, central universities and private universities like Ashoka and Premji are reaching tipping points in research, budgets, quality, and students.

India’s security space is already transforming with intelligent procurement, spending shift to capex, lower average soldier age, integrated commands, cross-border strikes, abrogation of Article 370, QUAD partnership, etc. The proposed Defence Technology Council is a great idea; chaired by the Prime Minister, it will have an executive committee chaired by the Chief of Defence Staff and will include the Principal Scientific Advisor, three service chiefs, academics, and industry representatives. Partnering with universities will also improve project management; the CAG recently flagged that 67 per cent of the 178 defence projects evaluated didn’t adhere to timelines.

India is improving at building companies, but better choreography between universities and government will help us build industries. Thoughtful military leaders have always recognised the foolishness in the poem by Alfred Tennyson that glorified “charging into the valley of death” and known that Shaastra and Shastra are siblings; Field Marshal Rommel believed, “sweat saves blood, blood saves lives, but brains save both”. Targeting imperfect global university rankings for national security is debatable, but inevitable. Let’s do it.

Sabharwal is co-founder of Teamlease Services and Dhawan is co-founder of Ashoka University. Views are personal.

A five-point agenda to fix the country’s PF scheme could shift 50 million people from informal to formal work. Let’s blend idealism with pragmatism.

The excellent book Making Social Spending Work by Peter Lindert suggests societies need safety nets to catch those in need because of unlucky opening balances, past mistakes or hard times. A policy success of the last decade has been re-imagining India’s subsidy spend for 100 million citizens via direct benefit transfers for better social security. However, India’s unimaginative trade union movement—it believes job preservation is a form of job creation and chooses the old over the young—has hamstrung work-linked social security programmes with high costs, low competition and excessive deductions. Consequently, only 1 million of our 63 million enterprises and about 7.5% of our 550 million labour force make monthly social security contributions.

We propose five design reforms for the Employee Provident Fund Organization (EPFO) around efficiency, choice, competition, effectiveness and sustainability that would shift an estimated 50 million people from informal to formal work. These reforms matter because India’s big labour-market problem is not jobs, but wages. Lindert’s research suggests that countries walk different paths in public education, healthcare and pensions and welfare based on their philosophy about inter-generational inequality, fiscal redistribution and returns to human capital. He suggests social security takes off only with fiscal capacity; universal education is often under-resourced, spending is hijacked by the powerful and elderly at the expense of the young and poor, and ageing is the biggest threat to safety nets, employer-based provisions are flawed, and universal provisions provide more equity. India doesn’t have the ageing challenge; ours is regulatory cholesterol encouraging informality (a sense of humour about the rule of law). Let’s examine five flick-of-the-pen reforms that could accelerate formalization:

Efficiency: The EPFO is the world’s costliest government securities mutual fund; it charges employers ten times what an equivalent fund from State Bank of India does, with employers paying total expenses of almost 4% of contributions. Collecting these costs from employers amounts to taxation; globally, pension funds pay these costs. The EPFO should be a non-profit, flow-through entity with benchmarked costs, but it suffers the cost disease identified by Nobel Laureate Bill Baumol on account of a monopoly that holds employers hostage, not clients.

Competition: The EPFO and Employees’ State Insurance (ESI) monopoly on work linked social-security payments has toxic consequences for employees (disrespect and poor service), employers (high costs and corruption demands) and society (making informality more lucrative than formality). A budget speech by former finance minister Arun Jaitley had announced a push for competition. But the proposal was sabotaged by false arguments of private sector exploitation of employees, costs coming down with scale, and the effectiveness of enforcement, administration and fund management housed in the same organization. All three arguments have been disproved by our price and service revolution since 1991 in the sectors of petroleum, telecom, digital payments, airlines and steel. We can think about private sector provisions later, but should immediately allow employee choice (not employer choice) on paying their contributions to either the EPFO or public-sector National Pension Scheme (NPS). This election at the time of joining could be kept open to being changed annually, with easy interoperability between the two, replicating the relationship of our two equity depositories.

Choice: Salaries belongs to employees who should choose what to do with the money. Our prescribed gap between haath waali (net) salary and chitthi waali (gross) salary in a cost-to-company world is unfair; mandatory deductions that are sometimes higher as a proportion of salary for those earning less (possibly to ensure greater savings) are weird. Especially since research suggests the savings rate for individuals with incomes of ₹25,000 per month (or less) is close to zero, implying they barely get past essential spending. Employees should get two choices: Whether to make any employee contribution at all (set at 12% right now), and if so, whether to opt out of the portion that goes to the defined-benefit Employee Pension Scheme (EPS) and contribute the sum fully to the core Employee Provident Fund (EFP) account.

Effectiveness: Employment has shifted from being a lifetime contract to a taxicab relationship; most employees of this generation will have multiple employers, including themselves. The EPFO has a design birth defect that links records to employers rather than employees and their hundreds and thousands of orphaned accounts, with the last estimate putting unclaimed balances at over ₹25,000 crore. Making EPFO contributions to an Aadhaar number will create traceability, portability and access. This change will also enable EPFO products to be offered to self-employed and gig workers.

Sustainability: The EPS diverts 8.33% of a subscriber’s salary to a defined-benefit plan. But the EPS has a birth defect; pension contributions or pension benefits can be fixed, but the EPS fixes both. This scheme has become even more unviable with the November 2022 court judgement that bankrupts the scheme, with the court upholding the entitlement of opting for a higher pension by contributing to the EPS on an uncapped salary. The EPS must be removed from the EPFO and merged with some universal and fiscally funded old-age security pension scheme like the Atal Pension Yojana. The EPFO, as a work-linked programme, must remain a defined-contribution plan to avoid the risks of ageing, inadequate investment income and cross-subsidization that it can’t handle.

Idealism and pragmatism: In 1947, Constituent Assembly member K.T. Shah wrote a letter to Rajendra Prasad suggesting that “We need a time limit for Directive Principles to be justiciable, lest they become mere pious wishes.” However, our distinction between fundamental rights enforceable in court and social objectives embedded in the Directive Principles was not a lack of ambition, but a matter of policy pragmatism.

India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had said, “We cannot have a welfare state unless our national income goes up. India has no existing wealth for you to divide; there is only poverty to divide. Our economic policy must, therefore, aim at plenty.”

We must continue our pursuit of the plenty that will pay for fiscally financed safety nets. But let’s also undertake five flick-of-the-pen reforms of employer social security programmes that would lead an estimated 50 million existing workers to make their transition from informality to formality.