The Union Cabinet’s approval of the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill, which proposes a single regulator for higher education, has revived concerns about centralisation and the potential erosion of institutional autonomy. These anxieties merit serious consideration. At the same time, they must be viewed in the context of the structural limitations of India’s existing regulatory framework and the sheer scale at which higher education now operates.
India today runs one of the world’s largest and most diverse higher education systems, enrolling over four crore students across central and state universities, deemed institutions, private universities, and thousands of affiliated colleges. Regulation through multiple legacy bodies such as the UGC, AICTE and NCTE has led to fragmented oversight, overlapping mandates, and a compliance-driven culture that prioritises procedure over academic outcomes. Over time, this has encouraged risk aversion, diluted accountability, and constrained the ability of institutions to innovate in curriculum design, research priorities, and pedagogy.
The intellectual foundation of the current reform lies in the Higher Education Commission of India Draft Bill, 2018, which recognised that the problem was not regulation itself, but how it was exercised. The draft proposed a shift from approval-based controls to outcomebased standards, alongside a clear separation between regulatory and funding functions. This distinction matters. A regulator that does not control grants is structurally better positioned to act impartially, transparently, and without conflicts of interest.
This approach also finds strong resonance in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which explicitly calls for a “light but tight” regulatory framework – one that ensures accountability and minimum standards while granting institutions greater academic, administrative, and financial autonomy. NEP 2020 acknowledges that excessive procedural regulation inhibits excellence, and that trust-based governance is essential for nurturing globally competitive universities.
From a policy standpoint, a single regulator offers three tangible advantages.
- First, it brings coherence to standard-setting, ensuring that quality benchmarks are consistent across institutions, disciplines, and regions.
- Second, it lowers regulatory transaction costs, freeing academic leadership from navigating multiple approval regimes, inspections, and redundant reporting.
- Third, it enhances national and international credibility by presenting a unified regulatory interface for collaboration, accreditation, and recognition – an objective central to NEP 2020’s vision of positioning India as a global knowledge hub.
Concerns about federal balance are legitimate, but they need not be fatal to the reform. Education is a concurrent subject, and national standard-setting has long coexisted with state-led implementation. A single regulator need not imply a single voice. If states are meaningfully represented in consultative and advisory structures, and if regulatory norms allow contextual flexibility rather than rigid uniformity, cooperative federalism, as envisaged in NEP 2020, can be strengthened rather than weakened.
The autonomy debate, however, demands a more direct response. Critics argue that a single regulator risks excessive control over universities. Yet experience suggests that autonomy has often been constrained not by one authority, but by many. Frequent inspections, permissions for minor academic changes, and discretionary interventions by multiple bodies have arguably done more to erode institutional freedom than a streamlined, rulebased framework would.
Autonomy is not the absence of regulation; it is the presence of predictable, transparent, and proportionate regulation. If the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill confines itself to defining minimum standards, relies on technology-enabled disclosures instead of physical inspections, and provides clear and independent appellate mechanisms, it can expand functional autonomy rather than diminish it.
The success of this reform will depend less on the symbolism of a single regulator and more on the restraint with which regulatory power is exercised. A system designed to enable universities, rather than second-guess them, can move Indian higher education closer to the goals of quality, access, multidisciplinary learning, and global relevance articulated in the National Education Policy 2020.
The choice before Parliament is not between regulation and autonomy, but between fragmented control and coherent governance. If designed with wisdom and restraint, a single regulator can become not an instrument of control, but a framework of trust for India’s academic future.
Contributed by: Kunwar Shekhar Vijendra Chancellor, Shobhit University, Meerut Chairman, ASSOCHAM National Education Council
