The University Grants Commission and Higher Education

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India runs one of the largest higher education systems on earth, with well over a thousand degree awarding institutions and tens of thousands of affiliated colleges enrolling something in the order of forty million students. Sitting at the centre of this system, with a mandate that is both enormous and persistently unclear, is the University Grants Commission. Almost every serious argument about Indian higher education, about quality, autonomy, private provision, faculty recruitment and reform, eventually turns into an argument about the UGC.

The Commission was set up in 1953 and given statutory footing by the University Grants Commission Act of 1956. Its founding purpose derived from a specific constitutional provision: the Union list gives Parliament responsibility for the coordination and determination of standards in institutions of higher education, while education itself sits on the concurrent list, shared between the Union and the states. Most universities in India are established by state legislatures, so the UGC was created to exert influence over institutions it does not own. It does this chiefly through two levers. The first is money: it disburses grants to central universities and to state universities that qualify under sections 12B and 2f of the Act, and an institution that is not 12B eligible cannot receive central funds. The second is regulation: it frames binding regulations on minimum qualifications for appointment, degree nomenclature, curricular frameworks, examination norms and the conduct of distance and online programmes.

The Commission also holds two powers that shape the sector in ways outsiders often miss. Under section 3 of the Act it can recommend that an institution be declared a deemed to be university, which grants degree awarding powers without a separate legislative act, and this route has been used extensively by private institutions and by specialist research bodies. And under section 23 it enforces the exclusive right to the word university, publishing periodically a list of self styled and unrecognised institutions operating illegally, which is one of the few consumer protection measures available to students in a market where the difference between a legitimate and a fraudulent degree is not obvious from a prospectus.

Recruitment, quality and the accreditation problem

The UGC's most direct effect on individual lives is through faculty eligibility. Its regulations prescribe the qualifications for appointment as an assistant professor, and the National Eligibility Test is the gateway examination, conducted since 2018 by the National Testing Agency on the Commission's behalf. Hundreds of thousands sit it each cycle and a small percentage qualify. The same regulations govern the Academic Performance Indicator style scoring systems used for promotion, which have been repeatedly revised after criticism that they encouraged academics to accumulate points through conference attendance and low quality publication rather than through research. The Commission's attempt to address predatory journals through a curated list of approved publications, maintained for several years by a consortium centred on Savitribai Phule Pune University, was itself contested and was subsequently discontinued in favour of a different approach, an episode that illustrates how difficult centralised quality assurance is at this scale.

Assessment of institutions rests with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, established by the UGC in 1994 and based in Bengaluru, which grades universities and colleges on a scale used for funding and for autonomy decisions. Technical education is regulated separately by the All India Council for Technical Education, medical education by the National Medical Commission which replaced the Medical Council of India in 2020, and legal education by the Bar Council of India, producing a landscape of overlapping regulators. Accreditation coverage has historically been incomplete, with a substantial proportion of colleges never assessed at all, and the process has been the subject of corruption allegations serious enough to prompt investigation and structural review. Reform proposals have recommended a shift toward binary accreditation, meaning a simple accredited or not accredited outcome, rather than the finely graded scores that create incentives to manipulate.

Reform, replacement and the foreign campus question

Proposals to abolish or replace the UGC have a long history. The committee chaired by Yashpal, reporting in 2009, recommended collapsing the multiple regulators into a single national commission for higher education and research, on the argument that separating funding from regulation and unifying oversight would reduce both duplication and rent seeking. A draft bill to create a Higher Education Commission of India, stripping the regulator of grant giving functions and moving those to a separate body, was circulated in 2018 and did not become law. The National Education Policy approved in 2020 revived the idea, proposing an umbrella Higher Education Commission of India with distinct verticals for regulation, accreditation, funding and academic standards. Implementation has been slow, and the UGC has in the meantime issued a stream of regulations enacting other parts of the policy: the four year undergraduate programme with multiple entry and exit points, the Academic Bank of Credits allowing credits to be stored and transferred between institutions, permission for students to pursue two full time degrees simultaneously, and a substantial loosening of rules on online and open distance learning.

The most consequential recent change for readers outside India concerns foreign institutions. Regulations notified in 2023 permit qualifying overseas universities to establish campuses in India, setting their own admission criteria and fee levels and repatriating funds, subject to approval and to the requirement that the qualification awarded be equivalent to that awarded on the home campus. The first movers included Australian institutions: Deakin University and the University of Wollongong both established campuses at GIFT City in Gujarat, which operates under a separate international financial services regulatory regime. British and other institutions have followed with announcements of their own. Whether this materially changes Indian higher education, or simply creates a small premium priced tier for students who would otherwise have gone abroad, is genuinely unknown at this stage.

The underlying problem the UGC exists to manage is one of arithmetic. The gross enrolment ratio in higher education, the share of the relevant age cohort enrolled, has risen from very low levels at independence to roughly the high twenties per cent, and national policy targets a figure around fifty per cent within the next decade. Reaching that means adding tens of millions of places, overwhelmingly in state universities and private colleges rather than in the small number of elite central institutions that dominate international perceptions of Indian higher education. Quality assurance at that scale, exercised by a central body over institutions created by states and funded by fees, is a genuinely hard problem, and the recurring impulse to solve it by replacing the regulator has so far produced more draft legislation than change.

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