Prof. Yash Pal Committee on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education

The Union HRD ministry may have downgraded the status of the 27-member Yash Pal Committee to an advisory body, but the panel has lashed out at the ministry on more than a dozen fronts in its final report. It has slammed the ministry for its “nervous and hurried response in starting new central universities’’, permitting “chaotic expansion in higher education’’, allowing undergraduate education to rot and swallowing autonomy through “intrusive bureaucracy and mindless regulation’’. The report has attacked the private and public higher education space of the country which neither “excites students’’ nor “equips graduates for the real world’’. Naturally, the report has not enthused the HRD ministry. It has asked committee members to “generate public opinion by holding discussions on reforming higher education across the country’’.

Early last month, the Yash Pal committee was informed that the Union HRD ministry had whittled down its position to an advisory body, but members stuck to their recommendations and the original terms of reference. When the octogenarian educationist personally handed over a copy of the report to HRD minister Arjun Singh, sources said, he was told that the election code of conduct had set in and he could take his report and hold discussions on reforming higher education across the country.

A copy of the final report vilifies all regulatory inspectors and notes that poor reforms have been the main culprit of several wrong goings in higher education. In these tough times, the panel points out one more bankruptcy—the one in the country’s intellectual banks, universities. While traditional universities, it notes, did not “create public confidence’’, private institutes have been reduced to “commercial entities of very low quality’’. Recent expansion in higher education, the report says, has not looked at the “impoverished undergraduate education’’ that caters to 6 million students who pass through a system which has “not renewed itself and has not provided opportunities to students’’.

This is what the Yash Pal committee had to tell the ministry for the latest kids on the block—15 central universities: “The fear of loss of agency of the university and the pressures of the ever-expanding demand for quality education have been met with a nervous and hurried response. Creation of a few institutions of excellence and some central universities, without addressing the issue of deprivation that the state-funded universities are suffering from, would only sharpen the existing inequalities. Mere numerical expansion, without an understanding of the symptoms of poor education would also not help.’’

The 27-member Yash Pal panel constituted in February last year has drawn up 14 recommendations in critical areas and defined a clear role and structure for the single body commission for higher education that would replace the host of other regulatory outfits like the University Grants Commission, the All India Council for Technical Education, the Medical Council Of India, Bar Council of India, Council of Architecture, Indian Nursing Council, Pharmacy Council of India and the National Council for Teacher Education. Some of the important recommendations of the Committee are:

1. Universities to be self-regulatory bodies, assisted by hassle-free and transparent regulatory processes.
2. Universities to be made responsible regarding the academic content of professional courses.
3. Professional bodies like AICTE, MCI, INC, NCTE to be divested of their academic functions, which would be restored to universities.
4. Curricular reforms to be the topmost priority of the commission for higher education.
5. Undergraduate programmes to be restructured to allow mobility .
6. No single discipline or specialised university to be created.
7. IITs and IIMs to be converted to fullfledged universities.
8. New governing structures in university to preserve autonomy in a transparent and accountable manner.
9. Single accreditation window for all higher education institutes.
10. Quantum of central financial support to state universities to be enhanced.
    

What makes the panel report all the more controversial is its recommendation of not just doing away with deemed universities, but also downing shutters of existing lowgrade ones. “Practice of according status of deemed university be stopped forthwith. It would be mandatory for all existing deemed universities to submit to the new accreditation norms within three years failing which the status of university should be withdrawn,’’ the report states.