The union government a few days back, said it will the higher education regulators including the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to create a single education commission in 2021, as envisaged in the National Education Policy. Though the idea is not new, having been promoted in 2012 as well, it met with resistance from both within and the then opposition in the government. That the idea would find favour in current times again probably misses a perspective. Can merging the education regulators promote greater autonomy and focus on better academic outcomes with facilitating and enabling provisions? If it can, why leave out Medical and Law regulators? If medical and law education are seen as practising professions, so are pharmacy and architecture. However, they have been kept out. Engineering is even a bigger practicing profession though it does not need a licence to practice.
UGC was setup as a Grants authority in 1956. The idea was to provide research and development grants to universities, centrally funded and autonomous Institutions so they could flourish along with the best in the world. The metrics they used to determine the quantum of grants However, suffered from logic, sometimes determined as block grants and sometimes determined by peer reviews. Such reviews However, went beyond the regulatory domains. Its effect was such that no one knew when UGC actually turned into a de facto regulator. Meanwhile the education sector too grew by leaps and bounds demanding more and more funds which was difficult in coming. Lack of adequate funds and the transformation from a grant giving authority to a de facto regulator led to even more regulations and conflict.
Be that as it may, RUSA a Centrally Sponsored Scheme, was launched in 2013 aiming to provide strategic outcome-based funding to eligible state Higher Education Institutions. The Central Funding was in the ratio of 65:35 for General Category States and 90:10 for Special Category States. What was interesting was that the funding came directly from the Central Ministry through the State Governments / Union Territories to the State Higher Education Councils before reaching the identified Institutions completely bypassing the UGC. The Funding to States would be made on the basis of critical appraisal of State Higher Education Plans, which would describe each State’s strategy to address issues of equity, access and excellence in Higher Education. This was the proverbial last nail for UGC’s diminishing importance.
AICTE set up in 1945 as a national level Apex Advisory Body to conduct surveys on the facilities in technical education and to promote development in the country in a coordinated and integrated manner, was accorded the Parliamentary approval in 1987 as a national regulator of technical education. The nation made massive progress both in building technical infrastructure and providing it with adequate quality manpower. From a meagre 50 odd technical institutions at the time of independence, we have more than 10,000 today. From a few hundred engineers produced then, the nation sees almost a million of them graduating every year now. Whereas the graduates of the elite institutions like the IIT’s and IIM’s leave the shores for better prospects, the AICTE produced engineers have built the modern India. Like every regulator, AICTE too suffered from the flip side of a constricting regulatory process. However, a very effective, transparent and accountable e-governance brought about a transformational change in its working around 2010 which stands good to this day.
Engineers all over the globe as much as ours and cutting-edge technology has made some giant strides in the development arena in the past 25 years. Our nation too is a beneficiary of those changes. We’ve seen changes occur that we couldn’t have even imagined back at the turn of the millennium reiterating the fact that technology and its facets including education need their own separate space and treatment. Every instance in life has a technology connect, be it mundane articles like a shaving razor or flying smart machines to moon or Mars. Today, mobiles have internet access, high-definition cameras, gaming capabilities, music storage and a whole host of apps, from ordering a taxi to finding a date in minutes. The entire electronic warfare is technology driven. The smart phones and the online technology have proved to be the only source in these pandemic times for reaching education to the students. Be it television, entertainment, gaming, music, the high-end computing, social media, messaging or any other is technology driven. Virtual universities of the future cannot function without technology.
Instead of letting it grow and make the nation proud, instead of making it the anchor for the flagship programs of the government, ‘Start-up India’ and ‘Make in India’ its merger with UGC appears only counterproductive.
A strong business process reengineering model, is needed if the objectives of NEP are to be realised. The new model must give way to the traditional functional, faculty centric courses, and geographic boundaries. Instead, universities must be modelled on Max Planck for Basic research and Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institutes for applied research with a focus on Productisation. The focus must shift from merely publishing papers. That alone can make “Start-up” and “Make in India” initiatives come alive with new markets and employment opportunities. This calls for a robust facilitating and enabling mechanism that does justice to both basic and applied sciences. TIFR was meant to research basic sciences. IIT was set up to use the postulations for creating products. Neither happens in its designed form. Could we then imagine a merger of TIFR and a Bombay IIT into one as a hypothesis? If merger was the answer, why promote specialised universities like a Petroleum or ‘Music’ or ‘Fine Arts’ university and so on and so forth? Disaggregation of disciplines happens when humanity makes progress. Products on the contrary aggregate technologies.
The future universities must be places, which coexist with the industry and become large multi-product, multi-process and multifunctional businesses. This needs an impassionate promotion of our technical education and its ecosystem. Only then they can collaborate on projects that solve real-world problems. ‘Atmanirbharata’ or self-reliance do not seek mergers but free enterprise. Only then ‘Swavalamban’ or self-sufficiency makes sense. One only hopes that the merger will not be seen as a monumental error 25 years from now with a new policy to separate them again.