Notwithstanding the overwhelming weight of informed academic opinion having turned against the varsity affiliation system, university managements across the country continue to expand the ambit of their operations by recklessly affiliating common and garden varieties of colleges with dubious and suspect antecedents. Vidya Pandit reports from Lucknow Despite over two decades of debate since the National Policy on Education (NPE 1986) first mooted the idea of discarding the university affiliation system — a distinctive characteristic of tertiary education in the Indian subcontinent — and replacing it with a network of academically and financially autonomous colleges designing their own curriculums and awarding institutional degrees, the ancient regime shows no signs of this widely desired metamorphosis. On the contrary with new colleges mushrooming cross-country in response to the rising demand for tertiary education, the huge number of colleges affiliated with India’s major universities has transformed them into the largest in the world. Thus Andhra University has 405 affiliated undergrad colleges; Bangalore University 400; Osmania 390 and Bombay University 300 (see box p. 59). Quite clearly supervising the operations, conducting examinations and awarding degrees to students of such large numbers of affiliated colleges stretches the resources of parent universities to the limit, leaving little time for them to supervise postgrad education and undertake research studies which should be their first priorities. “The affiliating system of colleges was originally designed when their number in a university was small. The university could then effectively oversee the working of the colleges, act as an examining body and award degrees on their behalf. The system has now become unwieldy and it is becoming increasingly difficult for a university to attend to the varied needs of individual colleges. The only safe and better way to improve the quality of undergraduate education is to delink most colleges from the affiliating structure. Colleges with academic and operative freedom are doing better and have more credibility,” comments a concept paper Tenth Five-Year Plan in Higher Education authored by Dr. Arun Nigavekar, chairman of the University Grants Commission in 2003. Yet it’s a telling commentary of the extent to which the higher education system has become change resistant that despite the overwhelming weight of informed academic opinion having turned against the varsity affiliation system, university managements across the country continue to expand the ambit of their operations by recklessly affiliating common and garden varieties of colleges with dubious and suspect antecedents. And perhaps nowhere else in the subcontinent is the abuse of the varsity affiliation system more apparent than in the Hindi heartland state of Uttar Pradesh — India’s most populous (166 million) and arguably most lawless, state. With its 35 universities which cater to 1.1 million students, UP has engendered some of the most glaring misuses of the affiliation system. The latest of these which is rocking the state capital Lucknow, is the consequence of an innovative interpretation of the Uttar Pradesh Universities Act, 1973 which has enabled university managements to rake in millions through the promotion of off campus education centres. It is notable…
