The powers and guidelines under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will be modified so that it matches the spirit of the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA) that emphasises on empowering higher education in the states.
“They (UGC and AICTE) do not really function with the state governments. They derive their powers from their respective acts. We are now looking at a paradigm shift where they all work together,” said Ashok Thakur, Secretary, Higher Education, Ministry for Human Resources Development.
He was listing some of the key goals of RUSA, while speaking at the All India Conference of Higher Education Ministers here on Monday.
Thakur said the fact that institutions under the state governments as well as those under the UGC and AICTE will work as part of a ‘complementary scheme,’ will, however, in no way mean that the “relevance of UGC and AICTE will vanish. They will only function within the perspective plan of RUSA.”
With the recognition that colleges are the building blocks of higher education, the RUSA aims to give them greater power. For this purpose, the scheme provides granting autonomy to higher education institutions and colleges when and if they fulfil all norms laid down by it.
According to Thakur, as many as 450 colleges with grade ‘A’ from NAAC are being considered to be promoted to the level of universities.
“Each college will get Rs 55 crore to become a university. Another scheme envisages a cluster of colleges to form a university. There is a proposal to form 270 such universities,” said Thakur. This was a better solution than creating new universities, promoted and run by people who do not have any ‘background’ in running them, Thakur said.
Most universities perform only administrative work and are not able to devote too much time to areas such as research due to the burden of managing too many institutions, according to Thakur.
“We want to reduce the number of colleges to 100 under one university,” said Thakur.
Thakur also spoke about the creation of a “national directory of leadership among senior faculty” and asked states to prepare their perspective plans for the scheme themselves, “to maintain their ownership over it”, rather than outsourcing them to agencies.