Uniform legislation for 14 central universities

In a bid to have similar higher standard of education in the new 14 Central Universities, the Govt wants to bring a uniform legislation to govern them all, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jul 31, 2007, 02:24:08 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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In a bid to have similar higher standard of education in the new 14 Central Universities proposed by the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the government wants to bring a uniform legislation to govern them all. The new universities would cost government Rs Rs 41,802 crore.

According to a senior government official, the HRD ministry will come with a draft law for all the new universities to have uniform high standards of excellence. Recently, Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia had told HT that the government intends to develop these institutes into “centers of excellence” at part with one of the best in the world.

The decision to have a uniform legislation is said to be a step in this direction. HRD ministry officials, who deliberated on the issue on Monday, said uniform legislation would ensure better regulation and maintaining of high standards of education. “It will also give a sort of uniformity to higher education system in India, which is lacking,” a ministry official said.

The government has also proposed that the new Central universities should be modeled on Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, the only university in the country among top 200 in the world.

The proposed law will also ensure linkages between Central universities enabling easy mobility of students from one university into another and a centralized admission system. However, the HRD ministry has some reservation on whether the centralized admission system would be possible for graduate and post-graduate studies in arts or commerce as evaluating students’ ability through a test may not be possible.

Government officials also said the proposed law will frame complete autonomy for these universities based on JNU governance model to check “political interference” in appointment of vice-chancellors and faculty. The law would provide complete autonomy to the executive and academic council on how to run the university within University Grants Commission guidelines.

The government also plans that 14 Central Universities will have an engineering school, a management school and a law school. But, the decision on the fees to be charges will rest with the university, an official said. The Planning Commission had recommended that the fee for undergraduate courses should be Rs 12,000 per annum with 40 per cent of students getting substantial scholarships. “The fee structure should cover 20 per cent of the cost for running the university,” the official said.

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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