In the recent Union Budget introduced for the 2026-2027 financial year, the Union government announced that it will establish five higher education townships, or university hub zones, near major industrial and logistics corridors across different states. The Finance Minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, reiterated the proposal in the post budget press briefing, presenting it as a shift towards integrated academic ecosystems where universities, research, skills and industry sit side by side, producing a smoother pipeline from education to employment.As she detailed out the plan for the proposal, it made the political intent explicit. States, she said, can offer land in challenge mode, and universities with different types of courses can come and set up, including through partnerships with universities abroad, so that students who would otherwise go overseas can receive the same quality of education in India. This is not a minor detail. It reveals who these townships are imagined for, and the higher education model the government is trying to normalise.If the proposal were centred on strengthening publicly funded universities that serve the country’s poorest and most marginalised students, it could be read as a public investment plan. Instead, it is introduced in a system already shaped by large privatisation, unequal access, everyday caste violence, and declining academic freedom. That is why the township idea cannot be treated as neutral development coming from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is a political project framed through the language of quality and global standards without naming the central question of caste, or how Brahmanical knowledge order rests on the everyday logic of untouchability.In a deeply caste rooted society, education has never been neutral. Universities reproduce hierarchy through admissions, faculty recruitment, language regimes, informal networks, and routine discrimination. Yet the township proposal, as described so far, remains silent on the safeguards that would make quality meaningful for India’s majority marginalised students. There is no clear public commitment that these proposed educational hubs will be anchored in institutions governed by constitutional obligations. There is no practical assurance on reservation in admissions and faculty hiring. There is no framework for fee regulation. There is no credible framework for anti discrimination accountability in these ultra elite private universities.What the proposal signals instead, is a corridor model in which states compete by offering land, corporate led private and foreign institutions are invited in, and branding substitutes for structural reform. In a deeply unequal society, that model is unlikely to expand democratic access for all citizens. It is more likely to produce elite education zones that function like gated communities. Token scholarships cannot correct a historical oppression that leaves the social composition of faculty, governance bodies, and peer networks largely untouched. This is how caste hierarchy adapts under Brahmanical capitalism, where inclusion is staged as symbolism while control of resources and advantage remain concentrated.Finance minister Sitharaman is framing the policy as townships which would be the solution for students who couldn’t go abroad because overseas education is expensive or because visas are uncertain. The imagined beneficiary is not the first generation Dalit, Adivasi, OBC, or minority student trying to survive in a resource starved public universities. It is the aspirational middle and upper middle class student seeking a study abroad type credential at home. In other words, these townships are being positioned as domestic substitutes for elite global education, not as a mass public higher education expansion objective.India’s higher education system is already moving toward a two track structure. On one side are elite private universities, foreign collaborations and unreasonably high fee structured institutions backed by big corporate capital. On the other side are public and state universities that educate the largest share of first generation and marginalised students, but struggle with faculty vacancies, infrastructure deficits and limited student support. The shift from free access to the free market is no longer subtle. It is visible, and it is political. In this context, corridor based townships create better funded spaces for those who can pay, while leaving the public system to absorb those caste oppressed students who cannot, formalising stratification instead of expanding democratic educational access.SC, ST and OBC students dropping outThe caste question becomes unavoidable when we examine the state’s own data. Between 2018 and 2023, 19,256 SC, ST and OBC students dropped out from Central Universities, IITs and IIMs. Central Universities alone recorded 6,901 OBC, 3,596 SC, and 3,949 ST dropouts. IITs recorded 2,544 OBC, 1,362 SC and 538 ST. IIMs recorded 133 OBC, 143 SC and 90 ST.When questioned in Parliament about the reasons for these dropouts, the government largely cited scholarship schemes and fee reductions. But it did not address the structural realities widely experienced by students and scholars, caste stigma around reservation, lack of mentoring, linguistic marginalisation, hostile campus climates, weak grievance systems and everyday casteist discrimination. If the state cannot secure dignity and safety within educational institutions it already governs, announcing new premium hubs would only displace it instead of solving the crisis.The access story that defenders of this model rely on also does not hold. India’s Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education remains below 30%. More than 70% of the eligible age group is still outside higher education. The National Education Policy target of 50% GER by 2035 would require massive expansion of affordable public university seats, faculty recruitment, and robust support systems across districts and state universities. Enrolment numbers alone do not constitute equality. More importantly, GER measures presence, not dignity.If marginalised students enter institutions only to encounter discrimination, stigma, precarious finances, and dropout, celebrating GER becomes an irony. It allows the state and its defenders to declare success while abandoning the structural work of justice. The National Education Policy 2020 has been in place for half a decade. Yet caste exclusion, faculty underrepresentation, campus hostility and funding precarity remain persistent realities.The affordability question makes the corridor model even more exclusionary. A government commissioned inequality report notes that, based on survey estimates for wages, a monthly salary around Rs 25,000 is already within the top 10% of wage earners. If that is the income level that marks the upper end of the distribution, the majority earn less, and many are effectively priced out of high fee, globally branded private campuses. In that context, education townships built on land incentives and private and foreign partnerships do not expand opportunity. They narrow it by shifting the system’s centre of gravity toward elite consumption and away from affordable public capacity.The land question adds another layer. Challenge mode encourages states to compete by offering land while ignoring the fact that public land is not neutral. In a caste structured economy, access to land and capital shapes who benefits from institutional expansion. When private and foreign universities are invited into corridor zones with land incentives, this does not expand the public socio-economic infrastructural capacity.The budget narrative also needs to be closely examined. The Education Ministry allocation has increased nominally. Consequently key research institutions such as IISc and IISERs have seen reductions in allocation. Faculty vacancies remain high across public universities. So when state institutions continue to face funding stress, the proposed model would encourage selective visibility with new schemes, research chairship and township announcements catching public interest, while the everyday public infrastructure of higher education remains strained.The township model also echoes a broader development template associated with corridor infrastructures, enclave projects and branding driven narratives of world class transformation. Scholars such as Christophe Jaffrelot have shown how high growth rhetoric in Gujarat coexists with uneven human development outcomes. Enclave growth can exist alongside deep inequality. When this logic enters higher education policy, universities begin to resemble investment zones rather than constitutional public institutions.It is therefore significant that the township proposal has been endorsed by Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar . He is not an outside commentator on higher education. He has been at the centre of India’s university governance as a former Chairperson of the University Grants Commission, the apex regulator for higher education, and as a former Vice Chancellor of JNU. When such figures claim that India has already expanded access and should now pivot to quality through corridor based university townships, the claim has to be tested against the state’s own record on caste and campus democracy. Reporting that draws on UGC submitted figures points to a steep rise in caste based discrimination complaints in universities, including an increase of about 118% over five years, alongside rising pending cases. That is not a system that has resolved access in any meaningful sense.Caste exclusion is not only a campus matterMore importantly, caste exclusion is not only a campus matter. It is a social structure that governs everyday public life, including repeated incidents where children and communities boycott meals cooked by Dalit workers in anganwadi’s and schools. And food in elite IIT’s IIM’s When caste stigma can still decide who is allowed to cook for children, celebrating access becomes not just misleading but politically dangerous, because it normalises the idea that the problem is solved precisely when the evidence shows it is intensifying and mutating.This is also the context of shrinking academic freedom. In the Academic Freedom Index 2025 update, India is placed around 156th out of 179 countries. That decline is not abstract. It is visible in patterns of surveillance, disciplinary action, and state led targeting of dissenting voices on campuses, including the harassment and incarceration of scholars and teachers such as Professor G N Sai Baba and Professor Hany Babu, and cases like Umar Khalid that signal the risks of political speech in university spaces. The shadow of Rohith Vemula’s institutional killing continues to mark Indian higher education as a site where caste power can be fatal, not merely unequal.In this environment, what exactly will these so called global townships guarantee, especially if foreign universities arrive? If caste hostility remains embedded and academic freedom is fragile, corridor townships risk becoming a rebranding exercise rather than a public solution, better buildings, global branding, and the same structures of exclusion secured behind a more polished narrative.India does not need to reject quality. But quality without justice, access without dignity, and expansion without equality will only reproduce hierarchy masked as inclusion. If higher education is to be a public good, it must be built as a shared right, not as a Brahminical gated community.Ashok Danavath is a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam studying caste, critical university studies, Indigenous studies, bureaucracy, and education policy.