As a professor, one is quite accustomed to receiving last-minute assignment submissions. This is usually the result of bad planning by the student. But occasionally it can be a tactical decision as the evaluator would be swamped, and may not have time for a more detailed scrutiny of the assignment.
Which of these was the key motivation for the government can be a separate debate in itself, but with only a few days remaining in the winter session of Parliament, four big bills were introduced. While much of the discussion centered (correctly so) around MGNREGA and nuclear energy, the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill needs a focussed discourse as well.
At its core, the bill proposes to replace statutory bodies like the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) with one apex body.
The functioning idea behind this is to simplify the confusing and often overlapping mandates of these bodies.
Anyone who has worked within the Indian higher education system can attest to the complex nature of these organisations. But before there is an attempt to solve the problem, one has to reflect on the epistemic nature of the issue.
The Chimera of Quality Education in India
Higher education in India is one of the only sure pathways to upward mobility for large sections of the population. However, the academic universe is littered with dubious institutions, ossified subpar pedagogy, and often run by people who are fundamentally academically malfeasant. There are entire sham universities, shell colleges, and engineering/management institutions which exist on paper but not in reality.
It is important to understand that this landscape of academic chaos and entropy is the defining nature of Indian higher education, and not the ‘islands of excellence’ that are littered across the geography like sprinkled stardust.
On these ‘gems’ I shall return momentarily. But for the vast majority of the nearly 800 districts in India (more keep getting created every year), quality higher education is still largely a chimera.
Most ‘top’ institutions whose legacy, quality, and credentials are beyond doubt, are located in top metropolitan urban centres far away or locked behind competitive exams that are extremely difficult to crack. Yet, young folks and their families still dream; every year lakhs of students pour out from their small towns and villages and enroll in these spaces.
And yet for every student who takes this arduous leap of faith, there are 20 who try to strike a middle path and go for a degree somewhere closer to home. It is these millions of students who need the most urgent intervention from the regulatory bodies. They are most vulnerable to exploitation, fraud and risking their future careers on subpar degrees.
'Stardust' Institutions: It's All About Access
Now coming to the ‘stardust’ institutions, wherein I will include not just the bulk of India’s 57 Central universities, top state universities and legacy colleges, deemed-to-be universities and private elite institutions—but also the 23 IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology), 22 IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management), 27 National Law Universities, seven IISERs (Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research), the top AIIMS and medical colleges, as well as the many of the 31 NITs (National Institutes of Technology), not to mention a multitude of private top B-schools. These represent an entirely different challenge.
The issue here is not about whether the institution is real or a financial scam undertaken by dubious promoters. Here, the issues are about access.
From admissions to recruitments, to the composition of all manners of internal committees, to the disbursal or use of funding patterns and student outcomes, many of these ‘stardust’ institutions are legacy nodes for reproduction of cultural and policy elites. In many of these spaces, the regulatory gaps are issues of ‘excess’ and not enough oversight.
To club these vastly different institutions within the same categorising framework seems like a bad idea to begin with. Perhaps this is why there existed multiple organisations.
However, if almost 40 years later there is a rethink to bring the entire landscape under the ambit of a singular organisation, then it is a testament to the failure of the federating approach. Institutional failures need to be studied, else we end up reproducing the same errors. If the original approach of having a centralised body did not work to the point it was considered to split up functions—how is a reversal to a centralised landscape going to ensure better efficiency?
One of the main issues has been the over-bureaucratising nature of regulation in Indian higher academia. As a scholar of critical caste studies, my immediate instinct is to always seek the cultural anthropology of caste in the nature of everyday functioning within institutions.
Academia, despite relentless pursuits by the marginalised, is still a predominantly elite savarna enclave, especially in its higher tiers.
Much of the regulation that comes forth is documentation-heavy (which invisibilises labour), does not trust delegation, thus everything is centralised (aggregating authority), and is blissfully ignorant or non-responsive to its own dysfunctional methodology. Many of these are very symptomatic of savarna (Brahminical)-led institutional frameworks.
Why that is so, and an elaboration of that hypothesis, is a different piece in itself. But within the context of this commentary, the fact that Indian regulation in higher education suffers from the aforementioned methodological issues is unlikely to get resolved with responsibility division or consolidation. This is because whatever new form the regulatory framework takes, it will reproduce the same impulses.
'Reform' or Smokescreen?
But maybe the bill had other intentions beyond the stated goal of “providing simplified regulatory systems for higher educational institutions in the country”. The higher education apparatus has deep relevance for political implications in the future, so any legislation on the subject has to be scrutinised through this lens as well.
The Opposition has been quick to suggest that the bill gives sweeping powers to the Central government. Such a centralised regulation undercuts the role and autonomy of state governments.
In the last month, five vice chancellors of universities in Rajasthan were ousted ostensibly on the suggestion from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the BJP’s student political organisation. The student wings of established political parties running the show in public higher education institutions is not new.
I grew up in West Bengal; tales of the erstwhile Left regime and the current Trinamool Congress running the show are not unheard of. It is the same in other regions and states. This is a political reality that complicates the regulatory task, especially when one considers that the promoters of institutions or highest appointees are almost always made with political equations in mind.
This bill in question, after enough bantering, is to be sent to a joint Parliamentary committee. That is often shortspeak for legislation purgatory—it is how the process works (or doesn’t). Which brings us to why this bill was tabled in the first place.
Was it from a genuine intent to simplify the regulatory frameworks of higher education? Was it a smokescreen to push through the big legislation such as the one around MGNREGA (which was done successfully)? Or was it an attempt to tame state governments control over higher education by centralising it, hoping it would get overlooked under some of the other bigger debates? Or was it just incompetence, a bureaucratic bungling that delayed this important bill to the last minute which resulted in it getting buried in discourse and significance?
Like most last-minute submissions, the motivation behind this one will also mostly remain a mystery. Meanwhile, the large army of higher academia professors and staff—one of the most overworked and neglected white-collar jobs in India, wait with bated breaths for the ‘new format files’ they have to now create basis whatever new regulation finally comes to them.
(Ravikant Kisana is a professor of Cultural Studies and author of the book 'Meet the Savarnas'. He can be contacted on X/Instagram as 'Buffalo Intellectual'.The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect or represent his institution.This is an opinion piece, and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)