In a major decision to revamp higher education system in the country, the Centre on Wednesday decided to repeal the UGC Act, 1951 to replace University Grants Commission (UGC) with Higher Education Commission of India (HECI).
The new Act will be called the Higher Education Commission of India Act, 2018 (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) and is likely to be tabled in the forthcoming Monsoon Session of Parliament.
“In a landmark decision, a draft Act for repeal of #UGC & setting up #HECI (Higher Education Commission of India) has been prepared,” HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar tweeted before leaving for a week’s education related tour to Australia.
Ironically, the Government’s much-hyped National Education Policy is yet to be unveiled. The NEP draft has missed several deadlines and seen three different committees under Javadekar and his predecessor Smriti Irani.
Javadekar said the draft Act is in accordance with the commitment of the Government to reform the regulatory mechanism to provide “more autonomy” to higher education institutes to promote excellence and facilitate holistic growth of the education system.
The proposed HECI would focus solely on academic matters and monetary grants would be under the purview of the Ministry, according to the draft.
The idea behind the change in system was that the UGC so far had been acting like a ‘Big Brother’and monopolised the financial grants and aids to the universities and institutions under its regulation. University and colleges have to often approach the HRD Ministry for release of funds. This ultimately hampered the quality of education.
The new body HECI will be directly under the HRD Ministry control and all the financial grants will be regulated from here leaving less scope of corrupt practices. Also the need was for an over arching body to control entire higher education system including academics, technical and research. Over the years, the power of the UGC had already diminished as there were various other bodies like AICTE, NAAC, RUSA etc, to monitor quality of technical education.
The central idea behind repealing the UGC Act is to take away its financial grants powers and put it under the direct control of the Centre making disbursement and allocation easier,” explained a top HRD Ministry official.
The HRD Minister at the same time appealed to all educationists, stakeholders and others to furnish their comments and suggestions by July 7, 2018.
Presently, the UGC, which came into existence in 1953, provides financial assistance to eligible colleges.
The HRD Ministry was earlier planning a single regulator for technical education, national council teachers training and UGC.
“However, it has been decided to strengthen the higher education regulator as it was felt that the current commission remains preoccupied with disbursing funds to institutes and is unable to concentrate on other key areas such as mentoring institutes, focusing on research to be undertaken and other quality measures required in the sector,” explained the HRD Ministry official.