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Academia irked by HECI move
Why it is in news?
- There is growing resentment within the academic community over the Centre’s decision to scrap the University Grants Commission and replace it with a Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which is likely to be without the grant-giving powers that the UGC possesses.
Criticism
- A lack of debate before the decision to the government seeking to take upon itself the power to finance universities.
- The low presence of professional academics in the proposed bureaucrat-heavy body.
- The UGC is a body created by an Act of Parliament. The government should have first called for a debate among academics and also in Parliament on how it should be improved, or to know whether the stakeholders supported its winding up.
- While the UGC Act mandated the commission ‘to inquire into the financial needs of universities’ and ‘allocate and disburse, out of the fund of the commission’ to the universities (under Section 12 of the UGC Act, 1956), now the Ministry has taken over the direct control over the allocations to be made to the universities, which will clearly convert the universities into mere departments of the government.
- This will bring the universities under the strict and direct financial control of the MHRD.
- This shift in financial control to the Ministry will be used for regimentation of knowledge.
Source
The Hindu