Ain’t No Body High Enough?
Is there a need for a supreme regulatory body for higher education in India?
The higher education sector in India is regulated and standardized by the University Grants Commission (UGC) set up in 1956. Ever since, other regulatory bodies such as the AICTE, MCI and DCI have come up to further regulate colleges belonging to specific educational schemes. Recently, there have been initiatives to restructure this mechanism and create a singular, supreme higher education regulatory body that would integrate and carry out the work of these multiple agencies.
The Indian higher education system is one of the largest in the world but ranked low on quality. In recent years the several regulatory bodies responsible for quality have been in the limelight for huge corruption and other not so good reasons. This year, Supreme Court questioned the legality of and stripped MCI (Medical Council of India) of the authority to conduct entrance examinations for medical colleges. The Delhi HC ruled that the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) was illegally regulating MBA courses. Just yesterday, the Madras High Court rebuked AICTE for harassing good colleges. The court found that the regulator had withdrawn approval to a 29 year old engineering college for extraneous reasons. As most of you have suggested, we need an efficient mechanism of assistance and supervision in place to improve the quality of human resources we are producing rather than regulatory bodies that create fiefdoms for themselves with their unaccountable discretionary powers, effectively discouraging honest educational institutions.
We need a complete overhauling of our education system if we want to give ourselves a better standard of life.