NOIDA, India — On the campus of Amity University, pretty much everything is a work in progress.

It's a place where eager students with corporate dreams step through tangles of extension cords and crunch bits of concrete underfoot on their way to class. It's a place where lectures can be drowned out by the scream of electric saws, and where construction workers sometimes seem to outnumber students.

Three years ago, this was nothing but 60 unremarkable acres on the fringes of an expanding New Delhi suburb — an expanse of vegetable fields and wandering animals.

Today, it's the pride of one of the fastest-growing private school systems in India. And if Amity's founder has his way, in less than a decade it will be the center of a vast chain of private universities, feeding a ravenous middle-class appetite for education left unfulfilled by the public university system.

"We want to have hundreds of thousands of students," said Ashok Chauhan, the ever-upbeat businessman who has, to the dismay of many traditionalists, emerged as one of most powerful people in Indian education.

Government universities, he said, "have not been able to deliver what people wanted. ... They are ruining the country."

In many developing countries, governments are failing to satisfy the soaring demand for higher education. Even the United States is coming to rely increasingly on a booming sector of for-profit education companies, which are drawing customers with promises of better value and teaching. The latest government figures put for-profit college enrollment at more than 5 percent of the U.S. total, up from 1.6 percent a decade earlier.

That same trend is playing out on a massive scale in India, with its enormous population and terrific economic growth. As a result, the nation is becoming a laboratory for capitalism's potential to provide the answer for education, but also a showcase for possible pitfalls.

India's higher education system is so hobbled by underfunding, corruption, outdated teaching materials and bureaucratic infighting that — except at a handful of hyper-elite, brutally competitive institutions — it often seems on the brink of collapse.

A government report last year found that just 8 percent of Indians of university age are in higher education. That's half the average of the rest of Asia, with hundreds of thousands unable to find spots at schools.

That's where Chauhan comes in, a man far from the typical educator. He's an industrialist, a businessman — and a man wanted in Germany on fraud charges. He's a self-proclaimed philanthropist who is often surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards, grim-looking men in polyester safari suits.

But a little more than 15 years after he began Amity as a small management institute, he and his schools have become ubiquitous. There are now 45,000 students, 2,500 faculty members and more than 600 acres of campuses. There are highly competitive Amity grammar schools and university degrees ranging from interior design to aerospace engineering. The jingle from Amity's ads has become background noise across the television spectrum.

It can be hard to separate Chauhan from his university. Chauhan's birthday is celebrated here with a monthlong sports festival. His wife's birthday merits a weeklong discussion of "human values." His son, Atul, is the university chancellor. Chauhan said he expects his family to control it for generations.

Sitting behind a wooden desk in his oddly bare office, dressed in a natty pinstripe suit, his pride is obvious: "Everybody wants to know: 'What is this revolutionary thing that is happening?' "

The answer, he says, is simple: The free market brings him students in droves.

"If someone is delivering a better good, a better material ... automatically the buyer will go to the place where the quality is better," Chauhan said.

This is how Chauhan talks. Students are "buyers," at least when they're not "raw products" and higher education is unapologetically a path toward corporate success.

"We take a raw product, we train them, we make them capable of success in the industrial and commercial environments," he said. "Our curriculum, our syllabi, is totally tuned to what industry requires."

If that sounds crass, the students who fill Chauhan's campuses say it's the nature of getting ahead in modern India.

"Money is everything," said Mohammed Wasey, a 19-year-old law student, relaxing with friends outside the university gate on an autumn afternoon. "That's why I'm here."

And here's another thing about Amity that students will tell you: It works.

Unlike many public universities, as well as dozens of fly-by-night private diploma mills, Amity gives its students the basics. It's far from the best university in India — it has a reputation as a respectable, if hardly outstanding school — but it has well-tended buildings, laboratories filled with equipment and professors who take time for their students. There are job seminars and professional counseling for soon-to-be graduates.

"In the public universities, nobody cares about you. You just go to class and labs," said Tony Premu, a second-year Amity biotechnology student. "Here, they take care of us."

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