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A Tribune Special
Revamping higher education
The NCHER will erode the autonomy of colleges and universities, says Sutanu Bhattacharya
India’s higher education system now awaits a total change, almost revolutionary. It is now a matter of time that the proposed National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Act, 2010, would be tabled in Parliament. Following the recommendations of the Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education, headed by Prof Yash Pal, a Task Force was appointed to prepare the Draft Education Bill.The draft legislative proposal has been placed on the website of the Department of Higher Education, Union Ministry of Human Resource Development. The objective is to bring the entire higher education system of the country under a single regulatory authority, to be called the NCHER. Within a year of passing the Act, three existing regulatory bodies, namely the UGC, the AICTE and the NCTE would be closed down completely and the jurisdiction of other regulatory bodies like the Bar Council, the Council of Architecture, etc. would be restricted only to professional registration. The only relaxation given is to agriculture and perhaps medical education outside the university system. In a nutshell, the entire system of higher education that relates to award of degree or even diploma (more than nine months) shall be governed by the NCHER authorisation.
Single authorityA single authority could replace the multiplicity of regulatory authorities and the consequent lack of coordination among them. So Prof Yash Pal proposed that for every five-year period such an authority should now vest upon a seven-member Commission –– the chairman, three full-time members and three part-time members. Thus, basically four persons would now regulate the fate of nearly 21,000-odd educational institutions currently existing in the country of which about 20,000 are colleges and more than 500 are universities, deemed to be universities, institutes like IITs, IIMs, ISIs, NITs, as well as research institutes. There is, of course, a novel idea of forming an advisory body with renowned academics as members called core fellows and co-opted fellows from each state and Union Territory. But this huge body named collegium is to be constituted in a manner that it would in reality be busy every year in electing its own chairman and executive committee and hence at the most it could only purport to prepare the list of eligible Vice-Chancellors for the proposed National Registry and the panels of names for chairman and members of the Commission, as and when required. The earliest regulatory body for higher education in the country was the UGC, established in 1953, and it was a single regulatory body working as a Commission, not Council. During late 1980s and early 1990s, the UGC was clipped off — two councils were created (AICTE 1987 and NCTE 1993) for regulating technical education and teachers’ education. It was around this period (1986–1991) that Prof Yash Pal was the UGC Chairman. Two decades have passed and now we hear just opposite arguments. Is India’s higher education system a child’s play of breaking toys into parts and then trying to re-assemble them? What is now proposed is more than that. The present regulatory bodies used terms like ‘recognition’, ‘approval’ or ‘enlistment’ for the educational institutions and their programmes. These terms are now replaced by the proposed power of the NCHER to “authorise”. No university or institute would be allowed to give degree or diploma without the “authorisation” of NCHER. This departure from the tradition would have far-reaching implications, and it indicates that a kind of centralism really underlies the proposal of Prof Yash Pal though he talked much about autonomy of education. The term authorisation is used only to mean delegation of one’s own power to others. By legal implication, henceforth all powers of giving degrees and diplomas would vest upon the NCHER only and the universities and institutes would merely be its authorised agents delivering them. The Prime Minister was reportedly not in favour of going for anything that would require constitutional amendments. For, education is now in the Concurrent List. Could this proposed “authorisation” by the NCHER, bypass constitutional amendments? There is another messy proposition. The NCHER would be a body corporate that could sue or be sued, and at the same time it was proposed to have the power of civil court. The idea seems to be an ill-conceived muddle of executive and judiciary powers, which is unacceptable.
States sidelinedThe proposed NCHER Act completely eliminated the role of the respective state governments, disregarding the fact that higher education is a matter included in the Concurrent List of the Constitution. For example, it stipulated that the commission would, at an interval of every five years and such other times as it deemed fit, prepare a report on the state of higher education and research for every state or Union Territory. Nowhere it is stated that the states concerned would be involved or consulted in preparation of such reports. Thus, the NCHER would assume an extra-constitutional superpower to act as a watchdog of the performance of the state governments in respect of higher education. The proposed Act further stipulated that the commission would present to the governor of the states such reports on the state of higher education and research in the state. Such direct reporting to the governors, bypassing the state governments, shows a total disrespect and disregard to the elected state governments. The constitutional norms and practices were also ignored as no such report could be cognisable by a state governor unless routed through the state governments concerned. There is an even more interesting proposal. The proposed NCHER Act made a stipulation on the function of the state governors. It proposed “The Governor of every state shall cause to be laid before the Legislative Assembly of such state, the report prepared by the Commission … concerning the state of higher education and research in such state, along with an explanatory memorandum on the action taken, or proposed to be taken, thereon in respect of each recommendation made by the Commission.” Can the proposed NCHER Act, described as “an Act to provide for the determination, co-ordination, maintenance of standards in, and promotion of, higher education and research…” in the country, make such stipulation on the action to be taken by the state governor? It clearly went beyond its jurisdiction. Moreover, without referring to the state governments, can the governors place reports including recommended actions to be taken, for consideration by the Legislative Assembly? Perhaps overenthusiasm towards rejuvenated centralism has made the education planners forget the Concurrent List and extent of jurisdiction of the Act they proposed.
Holistic education?The Yash Pal Committee spoke about guarding “… against the tendency towards “cubicalisation’ of knowledge”, as well as “fragmentation of knowledge” and said “A holistic view of knowledge would demand a regulatory system which treats the entire range of educational institutions in a holistic manner. All of higher education has to be treated as an integrated whole.” What was there in the view of the Yash Pal Committee in this ‘integrated whole’ comprising ‘all of higher education’? Let us quote the Committee Report in this regard –– “It is our strong recommendation that the new universities, including those we call Indian Institutes of Technology or Management should have the character of world-class universities… Let them be the blueprints of first-rate Central universities …Just think of Massachusetts Institute of Technology on which at least one of them was patterned. It would be nice to have a few Nobel prizes in various sciences, economics and communication coming from such transformed IITs…We can then look forward to the day when IITs and IIMs would be producing scholars in literature, linguistics and politics along with engineering and management wizards”. Clearly, Prof Yash Pal misinterprets ‘holistic knowledge’ as creating a great organisational whole with a single regulatory authority and multi-faculty universities and considers ‘all of higher education’ as only a few top-class Central Universities and IITs and IIMs that have the potential to grow as first-rate great world-class university in the pattern of the West. As regards thousands of colleges of the country, the Yash Pal Committee says, “There are more than 20,000 colleges in India. It can be confidently said that nearly 1,500 of them…can easily be upgraded to the level of universities.” So these will come under the NCHER authorisation. What about the others? Interestingly, to a committee that wished to rejuvenate higher education of the country, the fate of these colleges is simply one of a lot of other matters, as the Committee Report says: “And a lot of other matters, such as the question of affiliated colleges, have been discussed at length. We have been conscious of the fact that our committee should not try to do the job of the proposed NCHER.” So Prof Yash Pal did not wish to bother about these as he was after creating something great. But in the proposed Act also there is no provision kept for authorising or recognising the affiliated colleges and hence under the Act, the NCHER could not authorise or recognise these to give them grant-in-aid. These colleges would simply lose their direct grantee status for Central assistance, enjoyed under the UGC Act (Sections 2f and 12B)? Is it a deliberate design that only the authorised universities and institutions awarding degrees or diplomas would get Central assistance and that the NCHER could simply shed the huge burden of bothering about the development and disbursement of grants to about 20,000 affiliated colleges of the country to the states concerned?
Parable of the SowerUnfortunately, the myopic vision of the Yash Pal Committee is focused only on the world-class universities and institutes and at the most on some 1500 colleges to be upgraded to universities in a country where 374 districts out of 593 are educationally backward, having tertiary gross enrolment ratio (GER) below the national average of about 12 per cent, and placed MIT of the US as our role model, forgetting that it operated in the environment of a country where tertiary GER is about 70 per cent. Prof Yash Pal branded this as an “academic freedom movement”. True, in such a movement these days, a slogan like ‘let hundred flowers blossom’ might be denounced. What Gandhi and Tagore said about our education and their education, while comparing with the West, might also be forgotten as irrelevant in today’s globalised world. However, would the dream of Prof Yash Pal, for at least one first-rate great world-class university to have a few Nobel prizes and the IITs producing scholars in arts and humanities along with technical wizards, come true? Let this writer remind the Parable of the Sower of Jesus Christ, which we used to read as a text at our schools. We cannot sow a single seed and be certain that it would blossom into a great flower. In the parable, Jesus taught his disciples that seeds dropped on the path, on rocky ground and among thorns were lost. But when seeds fell on good earth, they grew, yielding thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. Would our education planners remember the education given by this parable?n The writer, a former Joint Secretary of the University Grants Commission, is currently Professor of Economics, University of Kalyani, West Bengal
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