From Outreach to Reciprocity: Rethinking Community Engagement in Indian Higher Education

Sakshi Vermani Rishi; Gunjan Rajput

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.90228

From Outreach to Reciprocity: Rethinking Community Engagement in Indian Higher Education

Author(s)	Dr. Sakshi Vermani Rishi, Dr. Gunjan Rajput
Country	India
Abstract	Universities are increasingly asked to look beyond their gates. Community engagement, understood as the sustained and reciprocal link between teaching, research and the social, cultural and developmental priorities of surrounding communities, has become a defining dimension of what it means for a higher education institution (HEI) to be socially responsible. This paper moves the conversation from a single-institution perspective to Indian higher education more broadly. It asks how enduring university–community partnerships may support contextualised learning, student development, faculty scholarship, inclusion and local problem-solving, and how such partnerships relate to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the idea of academic social responsibility. The paper is conceptual and methodological. It does not report completed empirical findings. Instead, it proposes a mixed-methods research framework that draws on student and stakeholder surveys, interviews, institutional document analysis and programme-level indicators, and it names the practical risks that research must anticipate: unequal partnerships, participation, limited resources, weak evaluation systems and the absence of community-defined priorities. Throughout, proposed procedures are kept distinct from claims that would need empirical verification. The central argument is that engagement should be judged less by how many outreach activities an institution counts and more by the quality of its partnerships, the learning it produces, the reciprocity and equity it practises, and the demonstrable benefit it brings to communities. The framework is offered as a foundation for future empirical studies and for institutional planning towards socially responsive higher education in India.
Keywords	Keywords: higher education institutions; community engagement; NEP 2020; Sustainable Development Goals; service-learning; academic social responsibility; mixed-methods research
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On	2026-10-21
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i05.90228

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From Outreach to Reciprocity: Rethinking Community Engagement in Indian Higher Education

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