Academic freedom, refers to a scholar’s freedom to express ideas without risk of official interference or professional disadvantage. India has a score of 0.352 in the Academic Freedom Index.
It is published by Global Public Policy Institute as a part of a global time-series dataset in close cooperation with Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Scholars at Risk and the V‑Dem Institute.
- The AFI uses eight components to evaluate the scores freedom to research and teach.
- Freedom of academic exchange and dissemination.
- Institutional autonomy and campus integrity.
- Freedom of academic and cultural expression.
- constitutional protection of academic freedom, international legal commitment to academic freedom under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and existence of universities.
The scores are scaled 0-1. The index did not report data for 35 countries – including the United States and Australia. Top Performers were Uruguay and Portugal top the AFI, with scores of 0.971 each, followed closely by Latvia (0.964) and Germany (0.960).
In the last five years, the AFI of India has dipped by 0.1 points.
Countries like Malaysia (0.582), Pakistan (0.554), Brazil (0.466), Somalia (0.436) and Ukraine (0.422) have scored better than India.
India has not performed well in components like institutional autonomy, campus integrity, freedom of academic and cultural expression and constitutional protection of academic freedom. The AFI has cited the ‘Free to Think: Report of the Scholars at Risk Academic Freedom Monitoring Project’, to suggest that the political tensions in India may have something to do with declining ‘academic freedom’.
The areas of concern are freedom of scholar, it might be that scholars are not given a free hand of their views resulting in a closed down view on religious and cultural practices. Many educational institutions and regulatory bodies, both at the Central and State levels, are headed by bureaucrats along with Politicization of educational intuitions.
