Archimedes’ Eureka moment came when he realised that the buoyant force on an immersed object was equal to the weight of the water displaced by it. The New Education Policy’s (NEP) Eureka moment will come if the implementation force of the regulatory reforms equals the weight of the words printed in the policy document.
While the weight is tellingly heavy in the print format, equal force needs to come from the implementation winds of change.
The NEP has an architectural plan for a central regulatory body, the Higher Education Council of India (HECI). This foundational HECI supported by four strong vertical pillars with distinct roles—central and single-point regulation, meta-accreditation, finance and funding, and standards-setting—not only needs to be policy-perfect but also implementation-realistic. Borrowing from the NEP in its own words, the HECI with its foundational super-structure must be free from the existing “mechanistic and disempowering” regulatory ecosystem across various higher education domains.
Global trends in the evolution of higher education have been characterised by models that have shaped the contours of policymaking in so far as governance and regulation is concerned. The Oxbridge, Scottish, Humboldtian, American, the UK’s Higher Education Corporation, the National University Corporation Act of Japan, etc. are all pointers of progress. Various global studies between 1985 and 2014 have traced all of these with immaculate precision and such studies have a major influence on India’s Atmanirbharta-driven NEP, which can solve India’s higher education regulation problems.
The evolution of Indian higher education has been characterised by various distinct phases—from public to private, from sophistication to massification, from capacity building to expertise building, etc. Each served different purposes but in modes and nodes of isolation. There was little or no coordinated effort to align and synchronise statutory and regulatory bodies like UGC, AICTE, NCTE, BCI, NMC (MCI), etc. Each of them operated in their own orbits of operational fiefdom. The visionary plan of NEP’s HECI to provide a broad framework for harnessing the disruptive power of a coherent synergy that’s available in abundance amongst existing agencies is a blue-ocean strategy of a kind.
This framework should not only bind the existing bodies in their new avatars but also infuse in their flesh and blood the emerging new paradigms of higher education. Each of the NEP’s four verticals has many unifying threads that need to be finely interwoven to avoid a mystic policy knot. Here is my initial six-pack wish list for a strong HECI:
The primary role of HECI+4 should be in determining norms and standards, eligibility criteria, metrics for compliance, financial outlay, etc with plenty of room for policy oxygenation providing flexibility to loosen the strings of policy strangulation driven by rigidity.
The composition of HECI and its four offspring verticals must be as diverse as possible to include bureaucrats, researchers, industry experts, academics from public and private HEIs, professionals, foreign experts of Indian origin, genuine civil society members, etc. A repeat mix of bureaucrats, retired academics, heads of ‘premier institutions’ will again deliver old wine in new bottle without a bottle opener.
HECI+4 needs to create a contemporary and functional model to replace the outdated and expired models of higher education process—application +approval+delivery mechanisms which despite their expiry date are still alive and kicking, thanks to certain reforms by certain statutory bodies like AICTE, UGC, etc. Need an overhaul of the overall procedural value chain.
The accelerated McDonaldisation of IITs, IIMs, IIITs, etc. has pressurised the need to deliver more with less resources. Such a tall order needs an inclusive public-private partnership model with equal access to state resources. This progressive policy pathway shall remove the current abnormalities that are biased towards public and ivory tower HEIs denying many deserving HEIs the much-required policy nutrients.
A creative and robust policy bridge connecting school-vocational-higher education with a strong conveyor connect to address the issues of the current disjointed connect.
HECI+4 must be Amazonised, Uberised and Democratised—provide all, for all and by all
This six-pack is not the main meal but definitely a strong appetiser. Let the cooking to serve our cerebrally gastric demand for quality higher education begin with this six-pack appetiser.
S Vaidhyasubramaniam vaidhya@sastra.edu
Vice-Chancellor, SASTRA Deemed University