Multiplicity of institutions is the bane of India's governance structure. It resulted in ministries working at cross purposes and at times actively undercutting each other's initiative. But one inadvertent good that came out of this is that, a host of institutions in diverse knowledge domains came into being in the country. Therefore in addition to the large university system that the ministry of Human Resources Development oversees, the country also boasts of a parallel stream of fine and not-so-fine institutions, set up under the jurisdiction of different central mininistries as well as state governments. Though the different arms of Government of India (GoI) have set up amongst themselves over 192* institutions, we focused on only those 149 which offered some educational programmes. While 91 such institutions offered long term educational programmes either at UG and PG levels, the rest offered facilities for pursuing a PhD with a registration from a nearby university. Almost all of them offered short term and in-service training programmes. Here are some of the gems we discovered? *For the purpose of this article we have considered only central government institutions

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Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit have always had a special place within the pantheon of Indian languages and hence the public domain has three major institutions focusing on all three of them. The Central Institute of Indian Languages is primarily a research organisation and looks at literature and oral traditions in India. An accredited PhD centre, it specializes in offering short term programmes in 11 Indian languages at all its 11 centres. But the other two, Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeeta and the Kendriya Hindi Sanasthan, are both university-level institutions, and they come under the public sector only because their administrative control in not with the UGC. They are very effective institutions in preservation of language and culture and offer academic programmes from UG to doctoral studies. Caption Despite active state support promotion of Indian language is still nascent

Where do many of these institutions stand?
How good are these institutes and what value they offer is the question that lingers on. Some of these institutions, though not as internationally feted as IITs/IIMs, offer courses which are so unique that employment opportunities are never a problem. But some of them, thanks to the fossilized systems of the state, have begun to resemble relics of an era bygone. The biggest hurdle, as Ashok Parthasarathy, former Secretary GoI suggests, is the lack of operational autonomy these institutions face, as they are tied to the administrative umblical chord of relevant ministries. Some of them like NIFT, IIFT and others have, by achieving a 'Deemed to be University ' status, gained the status and reach to enjoy a certain level of functional autonomy, which many other institutions could not even dream of. Resource crunch is another problem many of these institutions face. Dr. Ashok Jain, former Director of NISTADS, a CSIR lab, says, 'It is always a losing battle According to him the warped view of many funding agencies, which are only too ready to fund both new institutes and new initiatives, but never comfortable about spending money to sustain a programme over a long term has led to the plethora of half-finished institutes and programmes that dot the academic landscape of the country.

Yet another issue that impacts drastically on these institutions, is the intellectual isolation they suffer. University academics look down upon these research-focussed institutions as glorified training schools, whereas the scientists and reserachers in these institutions look at universities as fossilised entitites with no real connect to real life. And the truth lies somewhere in between. The artificial disconnect between research and teaching as well as between pure and applied research has resulted in a chasm, which in India is still too wide to bridge.