India’s current higher education system is large, ambitious, and structurally stalled. With over 1,100 universities and tens of thousands of colleges, it has achieved scale without coherence and access without excellence. Decades of reform have expanded enrolments but left governance largely untouched. The result is a system where ambition is plentiful, but institutional capacity to deliver it is weak. It is from this context, not ideological preference, that the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Anusthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025 arises. To treat it as an unnecessary centralising impulse is to ignore the depth of the failures it seeks to address.
The VBSA Bill represents a deliberate break from India’s compliance-heavy, permission-driven higher education regime. By creating a new class of autonomous, research-led institutions, it shifts authority away from bureaucratic control towards outcome-based accountability. The premise is straightforward: globally competitive universities cannot function when academic decisions are entangled in regulatory approvals, procurement delays, and fragmented oversight. Innovation thrives on speed, clarity, and responsibility, not circulars.
At the heart of the Bill is a redesigned governance architecture. The proposed institutional structure vests authority in compact, expert-led boards with a clear majority of eminent academics, researchers, and domain specialists, alongside limited government representation to safeguard public purpose. This is not ambiguity; it is intent. Regulator-driven micromanagement is replaced with professional governance, clear executive authority, and transparent accountability. In brief, VBSA institutionalises autonomy rather than dispensing it administratively.
Critics invoke federalism, but India’s problem today is not excessive coordination. It is incoherence. Universities operate within a maze of regulators, ministries, funding agencies, and compliance regimes, often receiving contradictory signals and facing prolonged delays. Accountability is diffused, outcomes are unclear, and autonomy remains more rhetorical than real. Faculty vacancies of 30-40 per cent persist not due to lack of talent or funding, but because recruitment decisions are trapped in multi-layered approvals. Research grants go unspent as procurement stretches into years, rendering laboratories obsolete before they become operational. These are not marginal inefficiencies; they are structural pathologies. Defending them in the name of federal balance reduces federalism to a procedural veto rather than a framework for effective governance.
For too long, reform has been pursued through schemes rather than statutes. Centrally sponsored initiatives have delivered episodic gains but little institutional continuity. Without legal backing, priorities shift with administrative discretion. Universities remain governed more by circulars than by law, more by compliance than by performance. The VBSA Bill seeks to correct this by placing reform on a statutory footing, ensuring durability, clarity, and accountability.
This statutory clarity matters because India’s educational expansion has far outpaced its capacity for knowledge creation. Despite accounting for nearly a fifth of the world’s college-age population, India produces a disproportionately small share of global research output and hosts only a handful of globally competitive universities. Public investment in research remains stuck around 0.7 per cent of GDP, but funding alone is not the binding constraint. Research remains institutionally marginalised, administratively constrained, and poorly integrated with national priorities.
The National Education Policy 2020 correctly diagnosed these failures and articulated a vision of multidisciplinary universities, research-led teaching, institutional autonomy, and outcome-based governance. Yet implementation has been uneven precisely because the institutional scaffolding was never fully rebuilt. Without statutory reinforcement, reform risks administrative drift. VBSA seeks to supply the missing architecture to a vision already endorsed in principle. Without it, NEP risks joining the long list of Indian policy documents admired for aspiration rather than execution.
Federal critics argue that national coordination threatens diversity and autonomy. In reality, diversity is already constrained, by fragmentation. Universities today align curricula and research agendas not with regional needs or academic strengths, but with eligibility criteria for centrally designed schemes. This is central influence without accountability. Properly designed coordination, backed by law and evaluated by outcomes, can reduce regulatory clutter and expand genuine institutional autonomy.
International experience offers perspective. Systems in Germany, the UK, and China have used national coordination to pool resources, set strategic research priorities, and reduce duplication, without collapsing into uniformity. The lesson is not that coordination is harmless, but that its impact depends on design, safeguards, and accountability. India’s current model combines weak coordination with heavy procedural control, a worst-of-all-worlds arrangement.
India produces nearly a million STEM graduates annually, yet continues to lose a significant share of its most promising researchers to systems that offer clearer governance, faster decisions, and genuine autonomy. In a world where knowledge production is a strategic asset, delay is not neutral. It carries real costs, in talent flight, underperforming institutions, and diminished global influence.
The choice before Parliament is therefore not between reform and federalism, but between managed change and prolonged paralysis. Federal systems endure not by freezing reform, but by shaping it through law, oversight, and democratic accountability. Proceeding with the VBSA Bill, while strengthening safeguards, is not recklessness. In India’s higher education landscape, the greater risk today lies not in reform undertaken carefully, but in reform deferred indefinitely.
Views are personal. Prof. Raghavendra P. Tiwari, Vice Chancellor, Central University of Punjab, Bathinda
