UGC Needs Reform. But The New Higher Education Bill Is Not The Answer
Yogendra Yadav | 24 March 2026 | The Indian Express
As a former member of the University Grants Commission (UGC), I would not shed a tear on the abolition of this apex higher education body proposed by the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) bill. The UGC is a broken, dysfunctional and counterproductive system. I would have happily supported the new VBSA architecture if the UGC was replaced by a new regulatory architecture promised by the New Education Policy (NEP), 2020: “Independent and empowered” bodies that institutionalise “checks-and-balances in the system, minimise conflicts of interest, and eliminate concentrations of power”.
Sadly, the proposed bill, currently under review by the Standing Committee of the Parliament, does exactly the opposite. The new regulatory architecture it proposes is a recipe for concentration of power that can only lead to centralisation, bureaucratisation and commercialisation of higher education — possibly worse than the present UGC system, hard as it is to imagine that…