After schools, Sibal ready to fix higher education

The government plans to set up a new education commission and smoothen the entry of foreign players in higher education among other things, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal told HT recently. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 27, 2009, 24:20:14 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government plans to set up a new education commission and smoothen the entry of foreign players in higher education among other things, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal told HT recently.

The proposed National Commission for Higher Education and Research will start working before the beginning of the 2010-11 academic year and will have best of both the Yashpal Committee and the National Knowledge Commission, the bodies that recommended sweeping changes in higher education regulation.

Existing regulatory bodies like University Grants Commission and the All India Council for Technical Education will cease to exist once the commission starts functioning.

“The idea is to give the job of regulation to experts in each specific field rather than to administrators,” Sibal said.

A draft of the proposed commission circulated to different ministries speaks of a six-member commission to regulate different streams such as technical education, medical education, architecture, general education, research and scholarships.

The commission would be an autonomous body like the Election Commission of India

For this to happen, the draft has suggested that the Prime Minister should make appointments to the commission.

Along with the new commission, the government will also have a law to enable it to accredit all higher education professional institutes within a timeframe—defaulters would be fined upto Rs 50 lakhs—

In addition, the HRD ministry has circulated Cabinet notes for a law to allow entry of Foreign Education Providers, against educational malpractices and for setting up educational tribunals to settle disputes between different stakeholders.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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