How does renaming and replacing UGC with Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) help?
UGC has miserably failed in setting standards, in mentoring institutions, in checking the mushrooming of substandard colleges and universities. Then there are 25% institutions that have less than 500 students. UGC, to my mind, should have come down heavily. But it has failed in its oversight act. We have reached a stage where you can’t get into a 9% to 10% growth unless you restructure your institutions. Many of our institutions are antiquated. The worst of the lot was Medical Council of India, which is replaced by a Medical Commission. The second is UGC, which is now being restructured. HECI brings in a far more empowered body, with strengthened oversight.
But how can HECI be radically different with the same UGC systems and staff?
You can’t govern HECI with the same staff. We brought in a lot of young professionals and new blood in NITI Aayog, and HECI must also build its own ethos and culture, (and) get a lot of academics on secondment basis from different universities. It has two major challenges — one, the HECI composition needs more academic representation; second — HECI should not get into micro management, it should have a long-term approach of laying down norms and standards, and bring in new talent.
What about the plans to divest HECI of fund release functions?
I think that funding is being taken away from UGC with good reason. If you look at 2012-17, 50% money allocated to it has not been absorbed by UGC; `480 cr is still to be absorbed. The reason is, there is hardly any clear criteria on how it distributes money to different universities. It is like the change from Planning Commission to NITI Aayog. Planning Commission was spending all its time in just releasing money on annual plans and five-year plans — it had become a releasing agency, focusing on utilisation certificates.
NITI Aayog doesn’t release funds any more, but it does monitoring, evaluation, ranks states on various indices, and thus creates healthy competition among states. UGC, similarly, should create benchmarks and put all related information on university performance in public domain so students are better informed when seeking admission, and that’s what HECI aims to do.
There are fears about funding being vested with government...
I do feel that funding should also not be released by government, there should be a second agency to decide this objectively through wellestablished and transparent criteria. And most of the processing should be online.