M J Antony: All in the name of higher education

OUT OF COURT

Although education has become big business, this is one field where the laws are weak and the regulators are slumbering. A five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court has been hearing the problems in private professional education for the past three weeks.

The issues regarding admission, fee structure and controlling capitation fees have become more complicated and apparently getting beyond the capability of the judiciary.

If Parliament had heeded the call of the court made long ago "" that a comprehensive law should be passed to cover these nettlesome issues "" the judges would have been spared the daunting task of sorting out the mess in professional education and getting blamed for the deficiencies in the schemes devised by them.

The job really belongs to the educators and the administrators. But they have shirked their responsibilities for decades.

Last week, the Supreme Court tackled another problem confronting higher education "" proliferating fake universities. In Prof Yashpal vs State of Chhattisgarh, the court declared that more than 100 universities created under a state law "shall cease to exist" because the law enabling them to function was void.

The Central government and the University Grants Commission (UGC) could have taken action against the proliferation of such universities, but they did not, for reasons best known to themselves. So it was again left to a few concerned citizens to move the court to erase this blot on higher education through a public interest petition.

The Chhattisgarh Universities (Establishment and Administration) Act 2002 enabled the setting up of universities by merely issuing notifications by the state government. Within one year of passing the law, 112 universities were established under it. Many of them had no buildings or campus.

Some of them operated from one-room tenements. The addresses of many of them ran like this: "Room No 201, II Floor", in a commercial complex in Raipur, or "Lovely University, Lovely Auto Complex, Jalandhar". The degrees awarded made a bizarre list: "Member of the International Institute of Medical Sciences" or "Fellow of the International Institute of Medical Sciences".

These so-called universities ran professional courses without the sanction of the All India Council of Technical Education, the Medical Council of India or other such bodies. The regulatory bodies either did not exist or shut their eyes to the devastating effect these universities were making on professional education.

The justification put forward by the state government was that the Act was passed to attract private capital since it did not have enough funds to establish such huge projects. Government policies have undergone a sea change since 1991 and the emphasis is on privatisation.

The UGC itself has made regulations that enabled joint ventures between private trusts and the governments. According to the state, it has been making an "experiment in the changing world scenario where the trend is towards globalisation".

The court rejected this privatisation mantra. The law enabled only a proposal of a sponsoring body to be notified as a university. This was not capable of attracting private capital, and a university thus notified would not be able to provide quality education to a large body of students, the court said.

What was necessary was the actual establishment of institutions with adequate infrastructure and qualified staff. This was absent in most of these entities.

What was striking in this case was the inert role of the regulators like the UGC, the Medical Council of India and the Bar Council of India (BCI). A few years go, the BCI had made a tour of Andhra Pradesh and found that scores of "law colleges" were merely marriage halls or deserted buildings.

The Medical Council's experience was little better, after the rash of privatisation. All these should have alerted the regulators to the new menace.

However, they had shut their eyes to what was going on. If the situation goes on like this, as a wag said, the doctors would bury their mistakes, the lawyers would hang theirs, and the engineers would be buried by theirs.