The government has drawn up a draft law giving itself the power to decide three-fourths of all admissions in private educational institutions, determine their fee structures, and impose government reservation policies on them.
HT Image
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
It will decide which professional college a student will study in, based on a list of multiple preferences. There will be no ‘domicile criterion’ in admissions.
The law marks a bid to establish the government’s stranglehold over India’s private colleges. The stated purpose is to curb the capitation fee menace, and to bring transparency in admissions. However, it also opens a channel for backdoor entry of quotas in private colleges.
The University Grants Commission’s draft UGC (Admission and Fee Structure in Private Aided and Unaided Professional Educational Institutions) Regulation, 2007, clearly states that the government’s existing reservation policy will apply to all institutions.
It gives UGC power to fix the number of seats in all approved professional institutions — a job now done by ad hoc state government panels, leading to complaints of corruption and huge capitation fees.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
{{^usCountry}}
The draft regulation, circulated recently, identifies four categories of seats in colleges: government general quota, government reserved quota, institutional quota, and management quota. Seats in the first three categories will be filled through UGC’s Common Entrance Test (CET). Non-CET students will be admitted through the management quota.
{{/usCountry}}
{{#usCountry}}
The draft regulation, circulated recently, identifies four categories of seats in colleges: government general quota, government reserved quota, institutional quota, and management quota. Seats in the first three categories will be filled through UGC’s Common Entrance Test (CET). Non-CET students will be admitted through the management quota.
{{/usCountry}}
In effect, 75 per cent of seats in unaided institutions and 85 per cent in aided institutions will be filled by the UGC, and quotas for SCs, STs and OBCs will apply.
In minority institutions, UGC will decide 50 per cent of seats. It will, however, notify the number of seats to be given to minority and non-minority communities in these colleges, the regulation states.
Students who clear CET will apply to UGC for admissions, not to colleges.
{{^htLoading}} {{/htLoading}}
It is UGC that will direct them to colleges based on their preferences. “Admissions to private universities and deemed to be universities would be on all India basis without any domicile restriction,” says the draft.
An Admission Monitoring Committee will ensure a free and fair CET, and a separate body will counsel students before admissions, the guidelines say.
A new fee structure committee will fix and regulate fees for government and reserved quotas, putting an end to capitation fees. Colleges can decide fees for management and institutional quotas, but they must be approved by the committee. “No fees other than the one decided by the committee will be allowed,” the regulation says.
The National Fee Structure Committee will have a retired Supreme Court judge as chairperson with eminent members from a range of fields, the regulation states.
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.
