The Supreme Court on Friday came down heavily on deemed universities and declared invalid thousands of engineering degrees offered by four of them since 2001.
The court found flagrant violations in the way deemed universities offered engineering courses through correspondence. The court ordered a CBI enquiry into the conduct of Government officials involved in granting approvals to these universities.
A two-judge Bench noted grave oversight in the functioning of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and officials in the Ministry of Human Resources Development to permit such an illegality to go on from 2001 till 2005 in granting approvals.
Giving benefit to the affected students who studied during this period, the Bench directed AICTE to conduct a fresh examination in all subjects within a month. Students will have two attempts to clear the exam following which their degrees will be revived and all benefits that accrue based on these degrees will be restored. Those skipping the tests or failing to clear them, will forfeit their degrees. The deemed institutions will foot the bill for conducting the test and will even refund the entire fees to the students who fail to clear. They will even return the fees to those students who secured engineering degrees post-2005.
Terming the present case to be an instance of how education was “commercialised” by certain deemed universities, Justice lalit, writing for the bench said, “Even when they did not have any experience in the concerned field (engineering) and had no regular faculty or college in Engineering, they kept admitting students through distance education mode…the idea was not to achieve excellence in the field but the attempts appeared
to be guided by pure commercial angle.”
The four institutions barred by the court from conducting engineering courses are: JRN Vidyapeeth, Udaipur (Rajasthan), IASE Gandhi Vidya Mandir, Sardarshahr (Rajasthan), Allahabad Agriculture Research Institute, Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh), and Vinayaka Mission Research Foundation (Tamil Nadu).
The court “suspended” all engineering degrees provided by these institutions between 2001 and 2005 and cancelled all degrees post-2005.
The court made this distinction upon learning that for the years 2001-05, the Joint Committee of UGC-AICTE and Distance Education Council (DEC) had given approval to conduct the course although it was a totally “flawed” decision. Even the 2004 UGC Guidelines allowed deemed-to-be-universities to apply for ex post facto approval.
To its surprise, the court found that the courses were also started without obtaining approval of the apex technical education regulator - All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
Ordering to stop all further admission into these courses beginning this academic year, the Bench of Justices Adarsh K Goel and UU lalit directed the Centre to set up a three-member expert committee to analyse and propose a roadmap to strengthen the regulatory mechanism for the deemed universities and higher education.
The Committee will give its recommendations to the Centre by August 2018. The matter will be placed before the Court for further consideration on September 11 next year.
The Court was highly critical of the conduct of officials in UGC, AICTE, DEC and HRD Ministry and said, “On one hand, the authorities were proclaiming their policy statements (UGC Regulations 2010 that restrained deemed universities from conducting distance learning courses), and on the other, despite there being complaints, they went about granting permissions.”
Terming this as “colourable” exercise of power, the Bench ordered CBI to bring all the guilty officials to book.
Commenting on the lack of oversight and regulatory mechanism to keep deemed universities under check, the Bench said, “Serious question therefore arises as to the manning of UGC itself for its effective working. We have found there was complete and flagrant violation of norms and policies by the Deemed to be Universities as AICTE had been illegally kept out.”
This seriously affects credibility of standards in education, eroding the power and essence of knowledge, and seriously affecting excellence and merit, the Bench added.