The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has recommended complete overhaul of the regulatory mechanism. It has recommended that there would be only one umbrella institution, the Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which will be responsible for the overall growth and development of higher education in the country. An attempt was made in the previous article to outline the vision and the agenda for action for the proposed HECI. Since it was not possible to cover all facets in that piece due to the space constraint, the present article attempts to reflect on the remaining aspects of higher education.
The NEP has recognised that higher education in India suffers from a severe quality deficit. It is noted that there are very few institutions which have global recognition in terms of excellence. It is of course essential that the few islands of excellence are nourished well and expanded. And, it is also necessary to ensure that in widening the base of higher education, the apex must not be allowed to slip down. At the same time, it is also equally obligatory to provide greater support to such institutions as they have the potential to raise their standards to achieve excellence as also to those that are still to pass the threshold level of accreditation. India should have at least fifty to sixty globally recognised institutions of higher learning. In fact, each state should aspire to have at least four to five such institutions. This, of course. would require hunger and passion for improved academic excellence on the part of the institutions and long-term investment by the Centre and the states.
The HECI should develop strategies to provide futuristic orientation to higher education with special support to research and innovation. This would require a number of measures like grant of complete autonomy to individual institutions, development of National Higher Education Qualifications Framework (NHEQF), subject-specific benchmarking, technology-mediated teaching and learning, introduction of awards to faculty for reflecting achievements on global platforms, evaluation of teaching-learning quality by students, peers and external agencies and strengthening of mechanisms for institutional and program accreditation. It will also have to carry out concomitant reforms in faculty development programmes with emphasis on enhancing skills and pedagogic awareness of teachers for improving instructional dynamics based on educational perspectives related to disciplines.
The HECI should lay the foundation of a healthy research ecosystem. It is an accepted fact that an essential mandate of the universities is to teach and train high quality personnel who have the capability to enter the challenging assignments of the dynamic society. An equally important fact remains that good teaching evolves out of good research and where teachers engage themselves in research, the situation becomes academically progressive. Utilising the enormous expertise in our national laboratories and institutions specialised in specific disciplines is another area which needs to be exploited for producing higher quality specialised scientists. A more productive climate of research and innovations in higher education is the need of the hour. The HECI should evolve a system to identify research priorities and emerging issues which on the one hand can provide solutions to local, regional and national problems and on the other can address global concerns.
The HECI should formulate policy for transforming institutions into power centres to attract talented scholars from all over the globe. It should provide for the establishment of special incubation centres and research parks and special support for research. In addition, it should also work out a strategy to optimise resources for extended utilisation of existing structures such as national labs and Inter University Centres (IUCs) like Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and provisions for the establishment of some more common research facilities in emerging areas of study.
The HECI should examine in detail the National Eligibility Test (NET) introduced by the UGC in the early 1990s for the purposes it was intended to realise. There is a perception that the test has little relationship with the pedagogical knowledge of prospective teachers. It should institute an impact study on the National Eligibility Test (NET) qualified candidates vis-à-vis their role as teachers. It should make concerted efforts to improve the quality of instruments used for NET and institute periodic analysis of NET results as a mechanism for feedback for renewal of curricula in different subjects. The current trends signify that there are certain subjects wherein the success rates are abysmally poorer than others. The design of the test may have to be revisited to make it serve a better purpose for identifying potential teachers with genuine aptitude for teaching and research.
Increasingly, a concern has been felt that vocational education with a focus on skill development in vocations which can be offered at undergraduate level and at the level of community colleges needs to receive greater attention. The ideas spelt out in the National Skill Qualification Framework (NSQF) should be seriously reviewed by the HECI to design strategies which can lead to the realisation of a middle-level skilled manpower in specified typology of areas. The proposed programs can be related to the options at certification levels in the NSQF. However, there can be other qualification options besides certification such as regular degree with credits in vocational courses, dual degree, integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s degree, vocational post-graduate (PG) Degree, and so on.
The HECI should set up a special group to identify vocational areas relevant to different regions for different levels and qualifications outlined in the NSQF and draft model curriculum in the identified vocational areas. It should identify and support institutions for offering vocational programs in collaboration with industry and other appropriate agencies besides designing placement mechanisms for vocational graduates.
School education and higher education have a symbiotic relationship. It is the school education which provides the flow of students to the university system. And better the quality of school pass-outs, greater the chances for quality output of students in different domains of knowledge at the university level. The HECI should initiate mechanisms to spearhead curricular and pedagogical reform initiatives through the university system for quality improvement at school level on the lines such initiatives have been established in other countries. At the same time, the HECI should initiate insightful discourses in teacher education towards fulfillment of the obligations of the National Mission on Teachers and Teaching. The HECI will have to sponsor curriculum study groups in selected universities to revamp the quality of school curricula in different areas. The university departments should organise courses for updating the knowledge base of school teachers falling within a defined jurisdiction.
There is a need for clearer articulation of the concept of internationalisation of higher education. Extending frontiers of knowledge for the larger good of humankind require that knowledge seekers all over the world join in the common quest for mutual learning. This sector has remained rather less participative by the national institutions of higher education. Probably this requires a greater effort for our institutions to raise their level to match the requirements of international collaboration in frontier areas of knowledge. The HECI should develop a hassle-free mechanism for the internationalisation of higher education which hitherto has remained on paper in most of the cases.
The HECI should design a mechanism to provide greater autonomy to institutions to enter into collaborative partnerships with the best universities abroad. They should have a free hand in working out areas of collaboration and exchange programmes. The issue of streamlining equivalency of foreign qualifications would be automatically resolved once the NHEQF is in place. The Commission should design policy measures to attract foreign scholars to enroll in Indian universities and for that it should not only create a web portal for single window information on all aspects relevant to institutions but also international student facilities.
There was no institutionalised educational survey in higher education until 2010. The survey which is now available leaves much to be desired. There are instances of premier institutions where the basic information about their students and teachers are neither available on their websites nor in their annual reports. It is extremely necessary to create an authentic database for the purposes of planning and mid-course corrections. It will be important to design necessary steps to set up an integrated mechanism for collection and analysis of information relevant to formulation of educational policies. The HECI should work out a systematic plan for the creation of a national data bank on higher education. It should make supply of real-time data mandatory by the institutions to ensure continuous updating of national data.
There are three types of existing models which govern the operation of higher education systems across the globe, namely the state-regulated, state-supervised and university entrepreneurial model. While the world has gone far ahead, we are still struggling around the most archaic model of governance. There is a need to bring into the higher education sector more efficient and productive models of improving the governance of the university system. It is hoped that the composition of the HECI would be thoughtfully provided for to avoid detrimental situations in its functioning. The nature of the divisions of the Commission should be such that each division is especially concerned with a specified area of emerging concern in higher education so that being an overarching structure it does not experience any difficulty in its smooth functioning.
The success of the HECI will depend on the good leadership. All the members of the founding team must be men and women of integrity and complementary leadership capabilities of thinking outside the box. There are a number of eminent professors and researchers with a proven track record of outstanding performance and reputation in the country. However, such persons may not be hankering for any positions. They will have to be persuaded to abandon their first love to take over the reins of the new organisation. It becomes all the more necessary as the proposal is to replace one Commission, set up under the stewardship of no less a person than Dr Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar and nurtured by the likes of C.D. Deshmukh, Dr D.S. Kothari, Prof Yashpal and Dr Manmohan Singh, by another Commission.
The writer is former Chairman, UGC. The views expressed are personal.