ON SEPTEMBER 24 THE bjp-led NDA government in New Delhi withdrew the National Commission for Higher Education & Research (NCHER) Bill, 2011, which proposed the establishment of a supra council for higher education subsuming the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
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In a statement issued after the September 24 cabinet meeting chaired by prime minister Narendra Modi, the government said the Parliamentary standing committee of the human resource development (HRD) ministry, which presented its 247th report to the Rajya Sabha in December 2013, had expressed reservations about several provisions of the Bill.
“The report also felt (sic) that centralisation of powers instead of assignment of roles and functions to the state governments were detrimental to the federal nature of the Indian polity. The performance of existing regulatory bodies would accordingly be reviewed to identify problems and areas of weaknesses in them and undertake necessary corrective measures as required,” said the statement of the new BJP-led government, quashing this brainchild legislation of former Union HRD minister, Kapil Sibal, based on the recommendations of the Yash Pal Committee (2009).
The statement added that instead, the new government will restructure and empower UGC as per the recommendations of a UGC review committee (headed by Prof. Hari Gautam, former UGC chairman), appointed by it on July 30 this year. The committee has been commissioned to evaluate the performance of UGC on 13 parameters including coordination and determining standards of education in universities; regulatory reach; its relationship vis-a-vis other regulatory bodies in the higher education sector; its role in providing autonomy and demanding accountability of higher education institutions; success in grants disbursement functions, regulating distance education among others.
With the withdrawal of the NCHER Bill the idea of establishing a national over-arching regulatory body for higher education, first mooted by the Sam Pitroda-led National Knowledge Commission in 2007 and endorsed in detail by the Yash Pal Committee on Renovation & Rejuvenation of Higher Education in 2009, which became basis for the NCHER Bill, has been dropped.
Academics in Delhi are divided on whether the newly-elected BJP/NDA government has quashed the NCHER Bill out of spite or conviction, because there’s no denying that the higher education system is governed by multiple regulatory and supervisory authorities often working at cross-purposes and implicitly discouraging the promotion of socially beneficial multi-disciplinary higher education institutions.
This was the reasoning behind the Prof. Yash Pal committee’s recommendation of establishing NCHER. In its 94-page report the committee said: “We would like to point out that there are no great universities in the world that do not simultaneously conduct world class programmes in science, astronomy, management, languages, comparative literature, philosophy, psychology, information technology, law, political science, economics, agriculture and many other emerging disciplines. Indeed the emerging disciplines do their emerging because of infection or triggering by other fields in the same university. That is the reason that such universities are so great and our academics keep going to them... Put together, all the disciplines, breed value into each other... We would share with you the prevalent feeling in our universities that there is too much inspection, interference and delay in their dealings with state and Central governments.”
Quite clearly, the seven-year debate on finding ways and means to drastically upgrade India’s sliding institutions of higher education is not over. Indian academics will have to wait until January to see whether the Gautam Committee will vest the powers recommended for the NCHER in UGC.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)