On 18 January this year, the Union Ministry for Human Resource Development filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court that of the 126 deemeduniversities 44 do not deserve their deemed university status because of their abysmal infrastructural facilities. Therefore, their deemed university status was sought to be withdrawn. This spread panic among the students and violence erupted in one of these deemed universities near Chennai. While pacifying the students on 19 January that not a single student would be adversely affected, the HRD Minister Kapil Sibal indicated that the provision of granting deemed university status under Section 3 of the University Grants Commission Act may be done away with. Kapil Sibal has been reported to have said that it was a “policy decision that all the deemed universities will finally go”. The P.N. Tandon Review Committee had stated that these institutions could be re-designated as affiliated colleges of the concerned state universities.

On 10 February, FICCI Ladies Organisation organised an interactive session on ‘Changing face of Indian education’ in New Delhi. Kapil Sibal while addressing the session made it clear that government will never allow profiteering in education that would go as dividends to the share holders. “Let us be clear that Indian businessmen, who probably because of meltdown do not get profit anywhere, want to get profit out of education. I, as a minister, will stand as a rock to ensure it does not happen,” he said. In response to a question as to why education should not be a profit making business, the Minister is reported to have said, “But we cannot risk the career of students to the fortune of stock market. We cannot allow profit going back to the share holders as dividend.”

All those students, school, college and university teachers, youth and others concerned about education who met in January 2006 in New Delhi in an All India Convention on Education felt good that two of their demands appeared to be getting materialised. First, that deemed universities should be reverted back to their original status as affiliated colleges and second that there should not be commercialisation of education.

However, it is necessary to understand whether the HRD Minister really meant what he said and he and the UPA government are really opposed to education as a profit-making business. Therefore, it is prudent to revisit the 100 days’ agenda of human resource development ministry announced in June 2009 by Kapil Sibal which included many issues having far reaching consequences for the higher education system in the country.

As far as private investment in higher education is concerned, the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh while addressing the meeting of the Planning Commission on 13 September 2007 said, “We must also seriously examine the role of private initiative in supplementing public funding for higher education. We obviously cannot rely on the private response alone but we should welcome it as a supplement. I believe that there is a role for private initiative in this area.”

The Prime Minister went on saying, “We should also seriously look at the proposal for fee increases to reasonable levels in a graduated manner accompanied by a scheme of extensive scholarships and loans which would ensure that no student is denied education because of his or her financial constraints.”

The Prime Minister himself set the agenda that private investment should be welcome and the fees may be increased. And there could be scholarships and loans for those who could not pay the fees. The adequate number of scholarships are never available but are mentioned in policy documents and speeches to thwart the resistance to fee hike. As far as loans are concerned, by September 2007 about 10 lakh students had taken loans from the banks. This number amounted to just less than 1 per cent of all students in higher education institutions in India.

With the increase in the difficulty in finding job in the current economy, students have been struggling hard to pay back loan that they had taken. Even if they get the job, the package offered is so low that the payment of loan seems to be difficult. It may take full lifetime to pay back loan. Now they want the government to take steps so that their loans could be forgiven. Recently, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has published the draft of National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill, 2010 based on the recommendations of Yashpal Committee and National Knowledge Commission in order to establish an autonomous overarching authority, the NCHER.

As one reads this draft Bill, one finds that this is not to “promote” but undermine “the autonomy of higher educational institutions”. This is to restructure higher education system for “competitive global environment” and not for catering to the aspirations of our youth. This is not for helping state governments to strengthen higher education but to snatch away from them even whatever their powers were left after education was included in the concurrent list of the Constitution of India during infamous Emergency. This is a Bill to create an all powerful Commission for the centralisation of all aspects related to higher education. This is a Bill to undermine the powers of the Parliament, State Legislatures and representatives of the people at large to opine and decide the education policy and administration of institutions of higher education in India.

The NCHER will develop national curriculum framework, guide universities in revising course curricula, specify norms of academic quality for accreditation, affiliation of colleges, and governance in universities, and minimum eligibility conditions for appointment of Vice Chancellor of any university. It will develop policies for interaction between students and teachers. It will take necessary measures including schemes for gradually enabling colleges affiliated to universities to function in an autonomous manner independent of such affiliation.

It will also specify the norms for financing higher education institutions, principles of allocation of grants for their maintenance and development and will disburse grants. The principal of giving block grants, rather than financing higher education institutions on the basis of their requirements, will be introduced. Thus there will be a total centralized structure with no scope for the academic activity in accordance with requirements of the states and areas. Much trumpeted recommendation of the Yashpal Committee regarding academic freedom of teachers and institutions of higher education is being put underfoot. There would be no scope for different syllabi in different States based on their socio-cultural conditions.

The power of the states to appoint Vice Chancellors of their state universities will be taken away. They have to depend first on the recommendation of the Collegium, heavily dominated by core Fellows appointed for lifetime, for the inclusion of persons in the National Registry and then on the list of five persons provided by the Commission. No person will be appointed as the Vice Chancellor if his/her name is not included in the National Registry.

The NCHER will be all powerful. Once it comes into being, the powers of the state legislatures to start new universities will be seriously eroded. They have to be established in accordance with the norms and processes specified by the Commission. And, in order to start functioning they have to get “authorization” from the Commission to award any degree or diploma.

The proposal to establish a 7-member NCHER reflects the tendency of the Central Government towards centralization of higher education. It negates the role of state governments and academia in strengthening the higher education system in their respective areas and in the country as a whole. It will prove to be retrograde for the development of higher education in India. Students and their parents and the Left parties have been demanding that self-financing institutions should be subjected to strict social control in matters relating to admission, fee structure, content of courses, and salary and service conditions of teaching and non-teaching employees. For this purpose, a central legislation is required empowering the UGC/AICTE/ MCI/ State governments to regulate universities and colleges set up through UGC Act/ Acts of State Legislatures. The objective should be to promote inclusive higher education by ensuring fair, transparent and non-exploitative administration of educational institutions.

The MHRD has now proposed a draft legislation, “The Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill, 2009”. It does not fulfil this objective. It could even nullify the operation of admission and fee regulatory committees set up by various State governments in accordance with the judgments of the Supreme Court. The loot of students and exploitation of teaching and non-teaching employees will continue. And the private or self-financing higher educational institutions will continue to make profits.

The MHRD has proposed mandatory accreditation of all educational institutions and for setting up National Authority for Registration in Accreditation of Higher Education Institutions (NARAHEI). At present National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA) undertake the accreditation work. These bodies do not have transparency and good track record.

Given the vastness and diversity of higher education in the country, the MHRD proposal points out that it would not be possible for the above two bodies to undertake accreditation of all higher education institutions and programmes of study. Therefore, in the draft legislative proposal, NARAHEI Bill, 2009, a provision has been made to register Accreditation Agencies for undertaking accreditation of higher education institutions.

There have been examples when public accrediting agencies raised the ratings of higher education institutions not on the basis of objective criteria but on some other considerations. The record of private assessing and accrediting agencies, particularly in financial market, are known to have changed the ratings of companies at their whims and fancies. If private accrediting agencies, which are bound to bring in business norms and practices into the accreditation process, are allowed to assess and accredit educational institutions, the ratings of institutions are not going to be above board. This will help profit making in self-financing or private educational institutions.

There should be ameliorative assessment of all educational institutions by public agencies, but it should not be linked up with accreditation or funding. Assessment should be transparent, democratic and participative. There should be no private agency for assessment. The assessment mechanism should also ensure the accountability of teachers and students. In fact, the educational institutions should be made self regulatory.

Kapil Sibal, immediately after assuming office as Minister for Human Resource Development on 29 May 2009, declared that to bring in the pending Foreign Education Institutions (FEI) Bill would be his top priority. The Foreign Educational Institutions (Regulation of Entry and Operation, Maintenance of Quality and Prevention of Commercialization) Bill, 2007 was planned to be introduced in the Parliament (Rajya Sabha), in the first week of May 2007. But due to the opposition of the CPI(M), it was withdrawn at the last moment.

Kapil Sibal, who was then (June 2007) Minister for Science and technology, had been pushing for this Bill. After the Bill was withdrawn, he had stated, “We are going to open up our educational sector to the foreign universities and it is going to be one of the largest FDI earners,”

No wonder that the Mint in association with the Wall Street Journal (USA) in its 11th June 2009 issue wrote that the “most recent effort by Indian politicians to ease restrictions on foreign colleges was stalled by leftist parties, who said the poor would be left behind as the cost of education rises. But India’s new coalition government, which took power last month, doesn’t rely on the leftists, improving the chances Mr. Sibal’s effort will succeed.” (Emphasis added) The Journal quoted Sibal saying “I would hope that come 2010, universities around the world will be sprinting to come to India.” He said he wants to open the market because India, despite its 1.1 billion-plus population, has an acute shortage of educated workers that threatens to inhibit economic expansion.

In a market-model university like the Foreign Educational Institutions (FEI), departments that make money, study money or attract money are given priority. Heads of universities assume the role of travelling salesmen to promote their programmes. The thinking and attitudes of students, now called consumers, are manufactured and an education system is created that produces standardised people. Thus the whole idea of culture will be threatened as this standardization eliminates cultural focuses, thoughts, language, and educational themes. No longer will truth be sought, except whatever suits the corporate interests. As this standardisation is institutionalized  through international equivalency, the uniqueness of each educational institution will vanish.

The Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in education, including higher education, is allowed in India under the automatic route, without any sectoral cap, since February, 2000. Despite this, no foreign university or educational institution sprinted to India and established its offshore campus.

It is due to the neo-liberal policies of the UPA government and its refusal to learn lessons from the recent economic meltdown that the people of the like of Sibal are hell bent to throw our higher education system to the predatory elements. People should recall that it was the opposition of the Left to raising the cap on FDI in banking and insurance sectors that saved their hard earned money. Otherwise, their savings would have been wiped out as it happened in the USA and elsewhere.

In fact, the FDI in any field does not have an attached objective of fulfilling the social agenda of a welfare state. It is guided by profit and market alone and if these are not fulfilled, the investors look for other destinations for FDI. Foreign investors aim to increase their profits that lead to commercialisation. In the field of higher education, FEIs would launch courses in frontier areas of science and technology, design courses which the market needs, create false impression about their courses through advertisements, charge exorbitantly high fees for courses which have immediate employment potential.

These tactics of the FEIs would also result in local private institutions raising their fee charges to establish competitiveness affecting adversely those students who are studying in local private institutions. The FEIs would tend to repatriate as much profit as possible back home thus accelerating the outflow of foreign exchange from the country. Therefore, the argument put forward by those welcoming FDI in education that outflow of foreign exchange from the country could be reversed has no sound footing.

It is clear that what Sibal says about deemed universities and not permitting profit making by educational institutions is tremendously misleading. He and the UPA government have been saying something and proposing entirely opposite. Main proposals of the UPA government are leading towards commercialisation of higher education. Those who felt good by Sibal’s statements, as mentioned above, must be careful. All that glitters is not gold. So is true with the statements of Kapil Sibal.

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