 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Nandita Narayan. She's a professor in St. Stephen's College and was a former president of Duta, an organization which has been in the forefront of struggles against privatization of education. And today we will be discussing about the draft Bill of Higher Education Commission Act of India Act, which will be replacing the current University Grants Commission Act or the UGC as we know it. So ma'am, if you could brief us on what exactly is HECI and how is it different from what we currently have as the UGC. Okay, so first I'd just like to tell you that for some years there has been a discussion about replacing various educational bodies like the UGC, AICTE and some other such commissions with one body which was earlier when the earlier government was their UPA. They wanted to bring the broader bill in which there was higher education and research commission. We are deposed at that time as well before the Parliamentary Standing Committee because the features of the bill were such that it was making way for greater commercialization of education. And in fact it had been brought in as part of certain clauses in the GATS treaty, the agreement, General Agreement on Traits and Services as part of what they call independent regulatory authority. And all policies of the government were being designed to, you know, in keeping with those provisions where funding was to be reduced gradually, government funding was to be reduced and this would be thrown open to the market. So we had to post it, then it had been withdrawn. Bidron means it was not actually followed through in Parliament at that stage. So it came as a bit of a surprise, not really surprising because you know the way in which policies are being made by the government in terms of education, without having a formal new education policy or national education policy which is being given month after month of extension, they have been implementing certain things which we had seen in the draft which are making for greater, you know, marketization or commercialization of higher education in particular. But it was a surprise that what they brought was to simply replace the UGC by another body. So the logic of having to bring in a new body because it was going to be really new and not merely a replacement of one of them, that logic was not there. So why did the UGC have to be replaced by another body where the UGC could have been strengthened, whatever you thought were the shortcomings, we ourselves thought there were many shortcomings. One of them being that the UGC had not been exercising its autonomy. You know the UGC stands for University Grants Commission. It was brought in through an act of Parliament in 1956 and the twin purpose of this body was to look after both the funding requirements as well as the regulatory part where you regulate the standards. So you make sure that standards are maintained in keeping with various acts of various universities and that there is a justification for different kinds of funding, that recommendation goes to the ministry and the finance ministry gives the money. But it was a buffer between the government and the universities so that there was supposed to be a degree of autonomy that it enjoyed and hence that autonomy would protect the autonomy of the universities as well. The autonomy of the universities required that the funding agency did not put you know did not exercise undue pressure on it and also that it was you know guaranteed funding because without that guaranteed funding you really could not survive, you could not give affordable quality education to the masses which is why these universities were set up. Now what has happened is if you notice first of all in the new body the name grant is missing, the word grant is missing from the name of the institution itself that itself tells you why the UGC had to be done away with because the intention of giving grants itself has changed over a period of time which we have been seeing through many other legislations or regulations such as the graded autonomy regulation one, two, autonomous colleges regulation in which the prime objective is to make universities and colleges self-financing and thereby they would have to increase the fees. Third, the HEFA higher education funding agency in which you would for infrastructure be given loans and not grants and which you have to pay back and you have to show that you can pay it back by raising the fees of students. So and then the latest was the 30 percent of the additional expenditure for revision of day, you have to generate yourselves. So we have been fighting against these provisions, it was giving us an indication of where the UGC is heading, where the government is heading, government funding over a period of time has been reduced instead of being taken up to at least 6 percent of the GDP, it has been reduced further from 4 percent to 3.5 to 3 over a period of time which has really been killing our research, hardly any money for any research grants for scholarships for students and for the normal day to day functioning of universities even even infrastructure. Suddenly you find in the refresher courses of Delhi University they say we cannot pay for your meals and for all the facilities that are given during the refresher course. So every day we are feeling the crunch. So this is the primary purpose of the new system. Now in this HECI what you find is, so first of all the funding part has been completely taken away and given to another body. Even if that body was another independent body even then it is not a good idea for funding and academic regulation to be separated. How do you decide how much funds university needs if you do not look at the academic requirements? These are two joint sort of functions they cannot really be separated. Second is the funding part has been given directly to the ministry which is not an academic body. How will the officials of the ministry decide what kind of funding is to be given to which university? It can only I mean we can speculate that there will be much greater political interference and non-academic considerations will be there for grant of funding, grant of withdrawal. They also say the secretary to HRD said that they will be given by MHRD or some other arrangement will be made. Now that's very suspicious. Function of this new body is to actually either close down institutions or monitor them in a way in which they have to really fall in line. Plus even at the best of times a one shoe size fits all approach does not work in a diverse country such as ours. You can't quantify every aspect of you know standards. You can't standardize and expect standards to be there. So that part is also very problematic. The third part of the composition in which from you had 12 members in the earlier one you have 14 here you had four out of 12 were teachers. Here you have two out of 14 are teachers and the majority of the members are ex-officials all heads of other bodies and director pointies of the you know the ministry to members of the ministry and so on three members of the ministry and so on. So you find that this body in itself is also has much less degree of independence from the government. Even if the government has nominated a teacher you might expect some degree of independence from that teacher but if you have an ex-official member then they will have to throw the line that is given laying down by the government. So we find seven out of 12 are going to be these ex-official members and then they will also be in fear of their positions because the chairperson and vice chairperson can actually be removed. They have a five year term but they can actually be removed for all kinds of reasons including moral repertoire and so on which is very vague and therefore they will be functioning in fear and that degree of independence that they should have which should have been restored is going to be further eroded. So and then there is no representation of you know the vast majority of the country the SC, ST, OVC women at least a line should have been there that care should be taken that they are representations from marginalized communities and from you know the maybe the elected teacher representatives of the two major bodies of teachers our demand has been long-standing demand that both the AI facto which represents state universities and colleges and FED CUTA which represents central universities should have a place in this body. Is there any scope of say lobbying through these new that the policies that you are bringing in is there any scope of lobbying because there is no conversation that takes place unfortunately with this government we have not actually been able to have a dialogue they give you seven to eight days to give your reply you know and that seems to be like a you know cosmetic exercise they did the same thing within seven days give your reply to the graded autonomy regulation now we all gave our replies but it was I don't think it was even looked at there's no place where you can actually have a dialogue you know you need to be able to meet physically and have a dialogue earlier you would find AI facto FED CUTA representatives were called for dialogue but on such important matters where they're changing the nature of public funded education in this country they're not taking it through parliament they're not having any debate through parliamentary standing committee with stakeholders so that lobbying as you say I don't know how much lobbying there is but there is a huge amount of resistance and it's very surprising that for four years they've not been able to come up with an education policy on what basis are they making these fundamental changes which are going to affect the rights of the people of this country to good affordable education on what basis are they doing it what where is the legitimacy coming from we have already mentioned about how when this government came we've had earlier discussions on how since 2014 the policies of the upa have been taken ahead on a really fast pace so what is the role of the central government and this bringing in of HECI that we have now well it's the central government has done interest so how much is it going to play part in the implementation of these and how much interference of the government will there be now in well the government which is being I mean the particular political party which is ruling is actually pushing this change and my understanding is that this is you know our governments have become puppets of corporations which you know in a globalized world are pushing these changes in every country we have had a degree of resistance because we've had some sort of democratic functioning in the past but these days the all pillars of democracy are being eroded otherwise you might have got independent voices of vice-chancellors and heads of other institutions but that has been eroded in this in the last few years particularly I think the erosion started even in the upa time and it's deliberate because all our governments have been puppets in the hands of that you know the international forces which are moving for corporatization of both health and education the same thing is happening in other countries where even democratically elected governments have been under this kind of pressure through their senates and so on there's so many ways of lobbying but there's lobbying that is done is done by people and who have the kind of money the kind of power to actually make changes they decide who gets elected as prime minister they decide who gets appointed as vice chancellor as minister and so on so we're all I mean clearly we're all not free and the people of this country have to realize that we can't allow governments to sell us into slavery but this is really moving towards slavery you know when your right to even a basic education is taken away you're moving towards intellectual and therefore economic slavery I would just like you to tell us why it is important right now to fight against this and if if not if this goes at the pace that it is going if you could paint a picture as to what would let alone the world but India's education system or even a social standard would look like you know when the minorities are pushed out when you don't have girls being able to go to higher education so what would it be like well you see I mean almost 85 to 90 percent of people in this country belong to what we call the marginalized section if you just look at the census even by the most conservative standards the last few census that we've had if you count the just the SCST OBC and then you look at you know add to it the minorities the Satchar committee had very clearly brought out the level of educational backwardness even in the Muslim community which is comparable with the SCSTs so if you add all these up with the marginalized sections which you do not find their representation even these in these government institutions forget about private institutions um little bit of movement in that direction through reservation which has never been properly implemented is also sought to be reversed now by this government if you so coupled with these policies as well as the kind of control that government wants to exercise on what is taught and to whom it is taught and so on we find that we are going backward in time and the vast majority of these people are moving back into a completely unviable situation in terms of livelihood in terms of their education in terms of their empowerment to be able to intervene in their own lives or in the policies of this country which affect them first of all you wanted mission into a good university which is up till now a public funded university only when our public funded when our seats are filled up then only people go to when they don't get admission here they go to amity and other private universities but that's going to be reversed one is the standard will be sought to be brought down by standardization you actually bring down standards and the second is the fees will go up because you have mostly self-financing courses and therefore the difference between public and private will be reduced tremendously and people will then be forced to go to private universities if they can afford it otherwise they take loans if they can't they'll have online non-formal education so that is a something like this we are very much on the same page because none of us believe all of us believe that affordable quality education is absolutely central to not only our service conditions and so on but to the future of democracy in this country so i think that cuts across all political affiliations thank you so much ma'am for talking to us and as these things progress we'll come back to you for more discussion thank you for watching this clip