Media reports emanating from New Delhi, suggesting that a committee of the University
Grants Commission (UGC) is finalising the provisions of a Bill to regulate the admissions and fees of privately promoted deemed universities, indicate that the licence-permit-quota culture is alive and well in the Union human resource development ministry and UGC. A UGC (Admission and Fees Structure in Professional Study Programmes of Study in Self-Financing Deemed to be Universities) Bill is reportedly in the final stages of drafting. As indicated by its clumsy nomenclature, the Bill will empower UGC to regulate and supervise the admission processes and tuition fees levied by the country’s 125 deemed universities, which have been accorded university status for the high quality education they provide to students.

This populist proposal based on faulty premises and logic, is ill-conceived and should be aborted forthwith. For one, privately promoted colleges and institutions bestowed the honorific of deemed university — the list includes highly respected institutions such as BITS, Pilani, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Manipal and Symbiosis universities — are by definition well-managed and administered institutions of higher education, providing quality professional study programmes. That being the case, there’s no need for interfering with their admission processes and fee structures.

Quite obviously, the country’s deemed universities have provoked the inherent command-and-control impulses of  education czars of the Union HRD ministry and UGC, because of their popularity with the students community. Because of the high quality professional (medical, engineering, business management etc) education they provide, the demand for admission into deemed universities far exceeds capacity available. Therefore in the suspicious collective mind of the education bureaucracy, there’s the perception that tuition fees levied by the deemed universities are exorbitant. Yet even a cursory comparison of the fee structures of India’s privately-promoted professional colleges and deemed universities with fees charged by higher education institutions in other democratic countries, will show up that private collegiate tuition costs a fraction of what it does abroad. To compare the fees of deemed universities with those of heavily subsidised government-run colleges as is the fashion, is intellectual dishonesty of the worst order. Indeed, as has been often argued in these columns, there’s no case for indiscriminate subsidisation of professional education even in government institutions.

More significantly, the proposed Bill to regulate admissions and fees in deemed universities is tantamount to brazen contempt of the spirit of the Supreme Court’s judgements in the T.M.A Pai Foundation (2002) and P.A Inamdar (2005) cases. In both cases full benches of the apex court ruled that private, unaided colleges of professional education have a fundamental right to determine their own admission processes and fee structures, subject to their being merit-based and reasonable in relation to actual costs of education provision.

Typically, bureaucrats in the HRD ministry and UGC are unaware that India’s moribund higher education system needs more autonomy, rather than greater regulation.