HIGHER STANDARDS FOR HIGHER EDU

NDIA'S higher education system now enrols crores of students every year, making it one of the biggest anywhere.

- MAMIDALA JAGADESH KUMAR

However, it struggles with a regulatory architecture built for another era.Four national regulators touch almost all of India's college-going population. The University Grants Commission sets the broad rules for the vast majority of learners (~80 percent). Technical, teacher education, and architecture programmes fall under the jurisdiction of the All India Council for Technical Education, the National Council for Teacher Education, and the Council of Architecture, which together supervise over 10 percent of the rest. Parents, employers and students are increasingly asking a simple question: can this system actually deliver strong learning outcomes and meaningful careers?

The National Education Policy, 2020 argued that regulation should be firm on ethics and quality, yet minimal in everyday interference to provide greater autonomy for well-performing institutions. This balance is surprisingly difficult to achieve when multiple regulators issue separate norms for the same institution. A single university that offers BA, BTech, and BEd programmes may need to fill more forms than whole classrooms in a semester to satisfy the requirements of different regulatory bodies.