South India's universities have genuine strengths especially emerging research cultures, demographic advantages, and geographic proximity to industries. The silence needed is around rankings obsession, credential inflation, and the habit of announcing transformation rather than practising it quietly, until it is real.
There is a Jataka tale in which the Bodhisatta is born as an owl, not the imperious bird in Western mythology, but a quieter creature perched in a peepal tree at the forest's edge, watching the other animals quarrel. The peacock boasts of its plumage; the elephant insists on its memory; the lion asserts sovereignty by volume alone. The owl says little. Asked why, it replies: "Because I am still learning how to ask the right question."
Twenty-five centuries later, that owl might find a congenial perch in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mysuru and other South Indian cities where a new generation of universities is doing precisely the same.
India's higher education story has long been narrated from Nalanda and Takshashila, names of an earlier era. South India's universities, many of them newer or newly reimagined, have been quieter entrants to that conversation. That quietness, it turns out, was not absence. It was preparation.
The Tortoise and the QS Ranking
The Panchatantra's tortoise crosses an ocean not by speed but by patient cunning. He persuades two geese to carry him on a stick gripped in his mouth, succeeding because he identified a structural gap (he couldn't fly), built a collaborative solution (the geese), and exercised the one discipline the other animals never managed: silence, at exactly the moment when speech would have proved fatal.
South India's universities have done something similar. Wisely unwilling to simply replicate the past university models, they identified their own advantages: proximity to India's most dynamic technology and startup ecosystems, genuinely multilingual campuses, and state governments with a demonstrated appetite for higher education investment. Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Kerala together account for a disproportionate share of India's engineering graduates, STEM researchers, and technology exports. These are not satellites of a national system. They are, increasingly, its most innovative edge.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has been many things to many people, a Rorschach test of educational ambition. But whatever one thinks of its implementation, it has done one undeniable service: created a common language for reform. South Indian universities that were already experimenting with interdisciplinary curricula before the NEP made it fashionable are better placed than most to speak that language.
The Mirror of Governance
There is a scene in the Mahabharata in which Yudhishthira is asked by the Yaksha what the greatest wonder in the world is. His answer: that every day, men and women see others dying around them and yet live as though they themselves will not die. The greatest wonder in the university context is equally counterintuitive: that institutions invest enormous energy selecting talented students and then design systems that prevent those same students from ever transforming the place that shaped them.
The Jataka corpus of six hundred tales, many of them sharp comedies about power and the peculiar incompetence of those who believe themselves indispensable, returns repeatedly to governance. A king who listens only to flattery. A council that mistakes procedure for wisdom. A merchant who confuses the size of his inventory with the quality of his judgment. The pattern is consistent: institutions fail from the inside, quietly, long before they fail visibly.
University governance in India needs its own reckoning. The distance between vision documents and daily practice remains, in many institutions, a chasm of charming dimensions. Boards meet infrequently. Academic councils ratify rather than deliberate. Decisions that ought to take days take months; others that deserved months are made in an afternoon.
Working on a framework for academic administrators at RV University, I kept returning to one realisation: most of what consumes a senior leader's time is not strategic but cultural. The strategy questions (which programmes to launch, which partnerships to build) are difficult but tractable. Cultural questions are harder: how we speak about a colleague when the meeting is over, whether a missed deadline is a defect to fix or a verdict to issue. These recur every day, and their answers are written not in policy documents but in habits. Reminded me of a popular management adage: culture eats strategy in breakfast.
The Jataka tales understood this. Vikramaditya's court worked not because the king was all-powerful, but because he was genuinely curious. Akbar's Navratnas functioned because the emperor allowed Birbal to contradict him in public. Good institutions are cultural achievements before they are structural ones.
This cultural failure has a practical consequence that shows up in classrooms before it shows up in board meetings. Multidisciplinary institutions, those that bring engineers alongside artists, lawyers alongside data scientists, are discovering that faculty development cannot be a single track. This is not a small ask. It requires administrators who can read a balance sheet and a poem, who understand both the logic of accreditation and the logic of a laboratory, who can have a difficult conversation without it becoming a verdict. These are not natural talents. They are cultivated ones, and they require institutions to invest in their own leaders with the same seriousness with which they invest in their infrastructure.
The Geese Are Already Flying
Return to that Panchatantra tortoise. His gambit works until he opens his mouth to respond to a taunt from below. The moral is usually read as a lesson in pride. But look again: the tortoise failed not because he was arrogant, but because he could not distinguish the moment that required speech from the moment that required silence.
Indian higher education is at precisely such a moment. The words needed are these: South India's universities have genuine strengths especially emerging research cultures, demographic advantages, and geographic proximity to industries shaping the future. The silence needed is around rankings obsession, credential inflation, and the habit of announcing transformation rather than practising it quietly, until it is real.
The NEP's aspiration to place twenty Indian universities in the global top 100 within a generation is admirable. Whether it is achievable depends less on policy than on the owl's variety of patience, the willingness to keep asking better questions after the easier answers have proved insufficient. It depends on governors who govern rather than preside, administrators who build culture rather than manage process, faculty given the freedom to fail interestingly, and students taught that uncertainty is a beginning, not a defeat.
There is a Jataka tale in which the Bodhisatta, born as a young brahmin, is asked by a king to train his ministers. He agrees on one condition: that the king attend every session himself. "But I already know these things," the king protests. "Precisely," says the brahmin. "It is essential that your ministers see you learning." Otherwise, the result is a curious inversion: the people with the greatest institutional power receive the least structured professional development, while those with the least power are trained extensively in skills they may not be permitted to exercise.
That, in those four sentences, is the whole of institutional leadership. South India's universities are beginning to understand it. The owl in the peepal tree is watching, and it is cautiously pleased.
Views are personal
The writer is the Vice-Chancellor of RV University, Karnataka.
First published in The Indian Express (Lucknow and North editions) and Financial Express (Bengaluru edition), 19 June 2026.