Disbanding UGC Part 4: For higher education or education for hire?

The proposed Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which will replace the University Grants Commission (UGC), will have fewer academics than the UGC: two serving Vice Chancellors, two serving professors from universities, one doyen of the industry. Of the total 12 members of the commission, three will be bureaucrats, namely the Secretary of Higher Education, Secretary of Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, and Secretary, Department of Science and Technology. Two chairpersons of other regulatory bodies of education and two chairpersons of accreditation bodies will fill the rest of the slots.

So, a commission will largely consist of bureaucratic academics, bureaucrats, an industrialist, thus sharply reducing the academic component of the UGC, with a bias towards skill development, entrepreneurship and management education. It is very likely to be a bureaucratic body including industry-staffed people. This assumption is based on the current government’s urge towards neoliberal industrial development and control over academic pursuits, sidelining its own existing criteria for judging the merits and strengths of higher education.

This legislation, that will do away with UGC and create the HECI, will withdraw financial powers from the main regulator of higher education - UGC and hand over these powers to the Central government. This will give the HECI unilateral, complete and absolute powers over all public higher education bodies. This means the Central government, through the HECI, can control, monitor, shut down, privatise, squeeze any higher educational institution. Any institution that asserts its rights for autonomy or questions the ideas of the regime in power, can be subject to denial of funding or even face shutdown. This opens the door for privatisation of many excellent public institutions. The plurality and diversity of public education can now be easily manipulated. The HECI can hike fees, change and dictate curriculum, and advocate admission rules.

If the Central government was concerned about UGC, a better way was to reform that institution, instead of creating a new centralised bureaucratic structure that will clamp down on higher education in India, and create a private system for the elite while stifling public education.

The proposed bill denies memory and work of earlier education commissions like the Yashpal Committee or the National Knowledge Commission; the government is showing its usual disregard for history. Besides, the draft HECI Act talks of the need for creating a body that will lay down uniform standards and monitor higher education, which is no different than what the UGC Act of 1956 had proposed. As far as claiming that this Act is for “changing priorities of higher education”, what these priorities are remain purposely ambiguous.

The predominance of bureaucratic control is evident in the composition of the proposed commission, where only four of the twelve members are required to be academicians, of which only two will be professors. So eight will be bureaucrats, with little or no academic standing or experience. The administrative staff will be ‘temporary’, in keeping with this government’s agenda of contract labour.

A number of vice-chancellors and professors from various disciplines were members of UGC. This body of academics was unceremoniously and sharply reduced in terms of numbers, following the bureaucratic imperative.

This proposed HLEC will have the powers to authorise any other institution to enter the higher education system. This opens the easy route for private sector actors, while strangulating quality public education that can only be encouraged through autonomous and democratic academic functioning.

In keeping with the myopic understanding of technology, the proposed bill focusses on e-interaction. Complete control by the Central government is clear from Section 25 which states:

25. Directions by the Central Government. —

1. In the discharge of its functions under this Act, the Commission shall be guided by such directions on questions of policy relating to national purposes as may be given to it by the Central Government.
2. In case of a disagreement arises between the Central Government and the Commission as to whether a question is or is not a question of policy relating to national purposes, the decision of the Central Government shall be final.

This essentially shows that the very autonomy of the HECI itself will be limited and the will, ideas and diktats of the regime in power will prevail.

So, the HECI is aimed at clear weakening, centralisation and bureaucratisation of higher education. This was not discussed in UGC or the accreditation bodies because of reasons politicians, bureaucrats and bureaucratic academicians know best. This is just another chapter of the dismantling of democratic institutions in the education sector.

Any peoples are known by their quality of education. But the HECI has a different agenda. Its goal is to saffronise education, including higher education, to utterly distort if not destroy the pillars of universities and institutes that have presented the real history of our country. Since the Sangh Parivar was formed only in 1925 and was virtually absent in the freedom struggle, from 1947, it became imperative for it to rewrite Indian history from the ancient times onwards. So even more than UGC, there is an agenda of the HECI to completely obliterate the course contents of history, economics, sociology, English literature and even Indian medieval culture. This is not higher education but education for hire by partisan and antiquated saffron propagandists. All democratic associations and teachers’ bodies have opposed this proposed draconian bill that is being pushed through in a great hurry.

This is so blatant that the RSS-inclined JNU VC M. Jagadesh Kumar, who is an engineer who knows no social science, opined in JNU that Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was a greater Indian figure than Jawaharlal Nehru. This is where the Sangh Parivar is actually taking higher education to - to much lower depths.

(The writer is Professor, School of International Studies, JNU)

Also Read

Disbanding UGC Part 1: Proposed act will kill autonomy in higher education

Disbanding UGC Part 2: RSS agenda of India’s homogenisation at the core

Disbanding UGC Part 3: Proposed bill confusing, without vision