 In the first wave of revamping the education system, Indian institutions were given autonomy on the basis of performance parameters determined by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council on NAC score. NAC imposes a set of homogeneous parameters for quality in all institutions regardless of region, resources, history, social profile of students and faculty. The accreditation guidelines are not scientific at all because they have no way to identify the diversity of educational needs in society. The guidelines do not distinguish between public and private institutions which have been set up for altogether different purposes. In simple terms, autonomy would mean more freedom for institutes to start their own courses, create new syllabi, launch new research programs, enroll foreign students and give them incentive-paced emoluments. This sounds good, but here is the problem. According to the general financial rules of 2017, all autonomous organizations, with no exception to universities, have to maximize generation of internal resources. For eventually becoming self-sufficient, they'd have to raise their user charges or fees since we're talking about universities. In other words, you paid tons of money to be educated in a decent quality environment. What happens to the ones not as fortunate? Who knows? There will be more financial pressure on the institutions as they will have to garner funds themselves to launch ambitious infrastructural or educational projects. For autonomous colleges, the financial autonomy is basically that the governing body of this college will decide how much the fees are and the self-financing courses will start there. This means that the student and parents' expenses are going to increase towards education and management will increase because of that, and then we'll see that the space to answer the question of the union's life is over for teachers and students. Going by NACC, universities or colleges scoring 3.5 or above are to be placed in category 1. Those scoring between 3.01 to 3.49 are to be bracketed in category 2. So by implication, those scoring below 3.01 or remain unaccredited will be under category 3. What the government claims is that universities will have the freedom to start new courses, set their own syllabus, hire foreign faculty, enroll foreign students, enter academic collaborations, run new academic programs. But what they don't tell you is that colleges will have to generate funds for the same themselves through self-financing courses. And the funding by the government would reduce drastically. What one should know is that in self-financed courses, teachers are not appointed on a permanent basis. Autonomy will mean increased management control in day-to-day running of the college and in deciding fee structure, admission, examination, service conditions of teachers and karamcharis, especially those hired to run self-financing courses. This is also an attack on the unions of teachers, karamcharis and students. So does this autonomy ensure better and affordable quality hire education? In reality, this scheme is a way to withdraw public funding to universities. Public funding of institutions of higher learning is a must for removal of socioeconomic inequalities and ushering in a truly plural and an upwardly mobile egalitarian social system. The Magna Charta University Tatum is worth quoting here. It says that to meet the needs of the world around it, its universities' research and teaching must be morally and intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power.