Opinion HECI Bill signals a shift toward centralised, loan-driven higher education

Perhaps the answer to the stalemate on UGC lies in a piece of legislation about to be tabled in the ongoing Winter Session of Parliament. This legislation, titled the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) Bill 2025, is neither new nor surprising. However, it explains why the UGC has not seen a duly appointed chairperson: Because the UGC itself is about to disappear.

The government claims that the HECI Bill is in keeping with the vision of the NEP 2020 and its call for “light but tight” regulation. The truth is that a draft HECI Bill was already placed in the public domain in June 2018, much before the committee tasked with drafting the NEP had even submitted its recommendations. At that time, the legislation – titled “HECI Bill 2018” – had garnered responses from an overwhelming number of concerned citizens, teachers’ and students’ associations, all opposing its proposals. The Opposition was so strong and strident that the government quietly shelved the Bill and allowed it to freeze in cold storage for seven years.

What exactly is the HECI Bill, and why was it so vehemently opposed by over a lakh respondents from the higher education sector, according to statistics revealed by the government itself? The Bill, in its 2018 version (and the only one in public circulation), seeks to repeal the UGC Act 1956 and replace three separate regulatory bodies for general, technical and teacher education – UGC, AICTE and NCTE respectively – with a single Higher Education Commission of India (HECI). The stated purpose of this is to “downsize” the regulatory ambit in order to bring in “less government, more governance.” Is it really what is at stake in the resurrected HECI Bill 2025?

All evidence points to the contrary. Since the Draft Bill from 2018 is all we have to measure the intentions of the current government for setting up HECI, it will serve us well to list out the major reform moves envisaged by such legislation.

First: The HECI will not only substitute a 70-year-old body UGC, but it will fundamentally transform the work of a regulatory authority in the field of higher education. The University Grants Commission, as the name itself suggests, was simultaneously entrusted with setting standards for institutions as well as disbursing grants to them through the state higher education councils. Under the new regime, funding seems to be delinked from the work of regulation and made into the preserve of a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) directly under the control of the central government. Understandably, public funding of higher education will be turned into a “reward-punishment” model for the ideological audit of universities and colleges.

Second: How this might play out for the state-aided college sector, particularly in the non-BJP-ruled states, could be read through the country’s GST saga. The union-heavy control over resources will impact state allocations.

Third: The very elision of the term “grants” signals a deeper policy shift, from the realm of public revenue-financing to loan-servicing. That the loan corpus of the Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) has been inflated at the cost of grants to the UGC, in several preceding annual budgets, is a sign of times to come. Institutions, in the HECI era, will be encouraged to move out of the shadow of the “grant” mindset and into the “loan” market in HEFA, accompanied by fee hikes and other recipes for resource generation.

Fourth: The composition of HECI signals a complete takeover of the functions of standard-setting by the central government – insofar as 9 out of its 12 members (in the Draft Bill) were to be recruits of the latter. If this is what “less government” looks like, then the message is clearly against state governments and the spirit of constitutional federalism.

Fifth: Add to this the power of the Commission to order the closure of institutions on the basis of “non-performance.” Who in the country’s higher educational landscape will face the wrath of non-performance? Will it be the private profiteering sector, which since 2014-15 has grown at double the rate of public universities and currently occupies 78.5 per cent of India’s college map? A glance at the latest government data from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) Report 2021-22 establishes that public universities still record nearly three-fourths of the country’s university enrolments. And yet, it is this sector which is the most susceptible to charges of “inefficiency,” owing to inadequate allocation of resources, teaching staff and physical infrastructure.

It is true that our regulatory bodies – ranging from UGC to NCTE – have failed to ensure either standards or finances for Indian higher education. But the corrective to this cannot be greater centralisation with more privatisation. Both of these seem to be the aims of the HECI Bill 2025.

The writer teaches at Jamia Milia Islamia