For students in India, April is the cruellest month. As daytime temperatures rise, the nights are thick with the burning of midnight oil, rustling pages and frenzied revisions as exam fever peaks. Papers and TV channels report wretched stories of teenage suicides unable to cope with the stress - 13 this year before their school finals.

By mid-May it will all be over. Till July, that is, when college campuses will explode with the admissions race among school-leavers and TV screens will resume programmes with names like 'Mission Admission' - titles that suggest aerial assault or trench warfare - rather than the pursuit of learning.

The crush for higher education, and the competition, get more cutthroat each year - not to speak of creeping costs. The cut-off percentage marks for admission to an undergraduate degree in economics at Delhi University's leading commerce college last year was 97.8 per cent; the average percentage for a liberal arts degree in, say, political science was 85 per cent.

Unsurprisingly, only a small fraction of the approximately 500,000 school leavers each year will make it to the couple of dozen 'branded' colleges or the seven IITs and six IIMs in the country to secure the best futures.

Despite annual ratings - like TV game shows - compiled by magazines comparing the quality of these premier institutions of higher education in India, there is no attempt at an international comparison. India's IITs and IIMs (that's a minuscule 16,000 undergraduates) are lucky enough to make it to lists of the world's 100 best-rated engineering or management colleges but a premier league institution such as Delhi University doesn't even feature in the world's top 200 universities.

Government investment in higher education is low, (eight new IITs promised by 2012 but seeing will be believing), growth is ad hoc, and the effort to seize control is relentless (the dangerous attempt last year, thwarted with difficulty, to interfere in the running of the IIMs.)

And, again, this week, IIM Ahmedabad's chairman was being mishandled by HRD Minister Arjun Singh, who demanded - and got - the assurance that 60 per cent of students would receive scholarships.

So where will the majority of school leavers in search of a degree go? To second- and third-rate colleges or to the burgeoning number of private universities that offer higher degrees - but with standards so variable, or costs so high, that many remain unrecognised by the government.

At least the argument for government-subsidised higher education in the old days was that it was cost-effective. But with rising middle class prosperity, more Indian school-leavers are going abroad than ever before.

A foreign degree assures social cachet even if it is no guarantor of quality. The "foreign section" of the Indian education bazaar is a bewildering mix of snooty showrooms, speciality shops and dodgy hole-in-the-wall establishments.

I visited one such "foreign education" trade fair in Delhi not long ago. Nearly a hundred stalls were set up in a large ground with several thousand visitors milling from door to door and being solicited by hard selling college counsellors, many armed with pocket calculators for rapid rupee-to-dollar conversions to work out minimum costs.

The US Educational Foundation in India reports that since 1997-98 the number of students from India has soared, recording double-digit growth in several years and overtaking China as the leading nation to send foreign students to America in 2001-2002.

There were 80,466 Indian students in 2004-05 (the last year for which figures are available), of which more than 70 per cent were taking graduate courses.

The British Council, which administers the bulk of scholarships to Indian students applying for higher studies in Britain, records similar levels of growth. Their press office in Delhi says that 27,000 Indians received student visas in 2007, registering, on average, an increase of more than 10 per cent a year.

The blighted state of primary and secondary schooling remains one the darkest spots of India's development story. But is the 'brain drain' of the 1960s and 1970s really over?