UGC plans to regulate fees of Deemed Universities

The regulator of higher education in India, the University Grants Commission, plans to rein in skyrocketing fees in Deemed Universities and make their controversial admission process transparent, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jun 15, 2009, 01:06:20 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The regulator of higher education in India, the University Grants Commission, plans to rein in skyrocketing fees in Deemed Universities and make their controversial admission process transparent.

The Deemed Universities —127 of them in all and all fiercely protective of their independence — will resist any attempt to regulate them. They are known to have gone to court to keep the government at bay.

But the commission is determined.

“Most complaints against Deemed Universities are of no transparency in admissions and unreasonably high fees,” said commission chairman S K Thorat in an exclusive interview to Hindustan Times. (Interview on Page 9)

“No government regulations are applicable to institutions run by Deemed Universities,” said Thorat.

A deemed university is called so because it is not created by legislation – either by the Union government or a state government – which is a necessary qualification for an institution to be called a university. Close to three lakh students study at the country’s Deemed Universities.

The 127 Deemed Universities run around 200 medical, engineering and management colleges around the country. Some of the well-known ones are Manipal University, Karnataka; Bharatiya Vidyapeeth and Narsee Monjee Institute for Management Studies, Mumbai.

Some of these are in danger of losing their status if they are found lacking during a review ordered by the new human resources minister Kapil Sibal as reported last week by this newspaper.

Here is how the University grants Commission plans to regulate their admissions and fees, according to a comprehensive plan ready for final discussions on June 22.

Thorat said they have a choice as far as admissions go: either pick up 80 per cent of their students from the existing all-India engineering and medical tests or they can start their own examination system.

The remaining 20 per cent of the seats can be in the management quota, to be filled as they please – against capitation fee or any other method or system. A panel on fee has made this recommendation to the commission.

On fees, this same panel said Deemed Universities could be asked to come under the ambit of state level fee fixation committees or a new all-India level committee.

“Such regulation would be bad in law,” said Ramdas M Pai, president of Manipal University, adding, “the government should monitor admissions and fees, through a committee, rather than regulating it.”

Dr Shivajirao Shripatrao Kadam, Vice-Chancellor of Bhartiya Vidyapeeth, said too much government regulation leads to corruption and is bad for private institutes.

This is not for the first time the government is trying to control fee and admissions in private institutions. In its bill to introduce reservation in the private institutions, the HRD ministry had a chapter on fee regulation and admissions. The bill was scrapped following stiff opposition from Deemed Universities and private self-financing professional colleges.

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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