A Central Regulator With Shrinking Accountability
The new higher education regulator Bill promises rationalisation but in practice concentrates unprecedented power in a single umbrella body while eroding mechanisms that once tied regulation to public funding and academic judgment. By abolishing the UGC, AICTE and NCTE and replacing them with the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan and its three councils, the Bill creates a vast supervisory structure without clarifying who will make grants or on what criteria scarce public funds will flow to universities and colleges. A regulator that can dictate standards, accreditation and penalties but has no responsibility for equitable funding is answerable more to the political executive than to the academic community it governs.
Token Federalism, Real Centralisation
The government’s defence rests heavily on the claim that states will, for the first time, have a place at the table, with a handful of nominees from state universities on the Commission and its councils. But this “participation” is rotational, minoritarian and advisory in a system where agenda‑setting, appointments and rule‑making remain firmly in the hands of the Union government and a centrally appointed chairperson. A structure that offers two professors and a few rotating state nominees in a 12‑member apex commission cannot plausibly be described as cooperative federalism when it will regulate thousands of state, private and central institutions across a continental‑scale system.
Undermining Institutional Autonomy
The Bill arms the new regulator with sweeping powers of inspection, authorisation and punishment, including heavy fines, withdrawal of degree‑granting authority and even closure for repeated non‑compliance. Such a compliance‑heavy regime, coupled with vague standards and the power to approve or de‑recognise institutions, will inevitably produce a climate of fear in which administrators prioritise bureaucratic obedience over academic innovation. When the same central authority can frame norms, assess compliance and impose crippling penalties, due process and academic freedom are no longer safeguards but afterthoughts.
Decoupling Funding From Regulation, Passing the Buck to States
Unlike the UGC, which combined regulatory oversight with the power to allocate and monitor grants, the proposed framework explicitly strips the new body of funding powers. The government has signalled that grants will be handled by a separate, as‑yet‑undefined mechanism under ministerial control, while the regulator will merely enforce academic and institutional norms. This separation opens the door to two troubling outcomes: central ministries can use funding to reward compliance and punish dissenting universities, and states will be pushed to shoulder a larger share of costs without having any real say in the rules that govern their institutions. In a landscape where most state universities already struggle with stagnant budgets and vacancies, such offloading of financial responsibility amounts to quiet retrenchment of the Union’s obligation to treat higher education as a national public good.
From Collegial Oversight to Bureaucratic Command
The Bill replaces a tradition of peer‑based regulation—where academics through bodies like the UGC shaped norms, assessed proposals and distributed grants—with a more bureaucratic model dominated by executive appointees. Collegial processes are further weakened by the absence of any serious consultative mechanism with faculty associations, student bodies or state governments; key elements of the new structure have been designed and introduced without transparent, nationwide deliberation. Once institutionalised, this shift will normalise the idea that universities are administrative extensions of the state, judged primarily by performance metrics and compliance checklists rather than by the quality, independence and social purpose of their teaching and research.
A Step Backward for India’s Knowledge Republic
For all its flaws, the UGC embodied the post‑Independence conviction that higher education was integral to democratic citizenship, social mobility and scientific progress, and therefore warranted robust central funding anchored in academic judgment. The new Bill threatens to replace that ethos with a regime that centralises control, fragments responsibility and quietly transfers the financial burden to already stretched state governments, turning universities into supplicants before both Delhi and state capitals. A reform that genuinely sought renewal would strengthen autonomy, deepen federal cooperation and guarantee predictable public investment; this one risks achieving the opposite, unmaking not just an institution but the very idea of higher education as a shared national commitment.
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai
