Reading the NEP 04: One Campus, Many Disciplines
English

On your college's letterhead,
under its name,
there is probably a line in smaller type:
affiliated to,
and the name of a university.
We have 600 students and five departments.
Now our principal talks of clusters
and mergers.
Are we going to be closed?
Under the policy,
that line is to go within fifteen years.
Every college that carries it is to become
a different kind of college.
Chapter 9 lists ten problems
with higher education in India.
The last is large affiliating
universities, which, it says,
result in low standards
of undergraduate education.
Chapter 10 proposes large
multidisciplinary universities,
colleges and clusters,
each aiming to have 3,000
or more students.
It calls
this the policy's highest recommendation
on structure.
3,000?
We have 600.
A friend who teaches history
in a rural college has 300.
The text says each will aim
for that number,
and a cluster of institutions
can reach it together.
It argues
that large campuses use buildings
and staff better,
and let students range across the arts,
the sciences and sport.
It then describes three kinds
of institution along a continuum.
Research-intensive universities give
teaching and research equal weight.
Teaching-intensive
universities put teaching first
and still do significant research.
Autonomous degree-granting
colleges are large,
mainly teach undergraduates,
and award their own degrees.
And if affiliation goes,
who signs our students' degrees?
Over fifteen years,
affiliation is to be phased out
through graded autonomy,
with more freedom
at each level of accreditation.
Each college is to grant its own degrees,
or to become a constituent college,
fully part of a university.
Until then,
each affiliating university is responsible
for mentoring its colleges.
The autonomy of public
institutions is to be backed
by adequate public funding.
By 2030 every institution is to plan
to become multidisciplinary,
and every district is to have
a large multidisciplinary institution
in or near it.
By 2040 all are to aim
to be multidisciplinary,
preferably with thousands of students.
For the country, the aim is an enrolment
ratio of 50 per cent by 2035.
In 2018, the policy says,
it was 26.3 per cent.
A large part of that growth,
the text says,
will come from consolidating, expanding
and improving existing institutions.
Consolidating.
For a college our size,
that sounds like closing by another name.
Chapter 10 never uses
the words closure or merger.
It says single-stream institutions
will be phased out over time.
A college of law or nursing,
for example,
is to add departments or join a cluster.
It defines neither consolidating
nor cluster.
A friend who teaches commerce asks:
if her college joins a cluster,
does she become someone else's employee?
In September 2022
the UGC issued guidelines
with three routes:
clusters, mergers and new departments.
For a cluster,
they say the recruitment,
service rules and pensions
of a college's staff will not change.
On mergers they say nothing about staff.
Her terms of service depend
on what her state
and her university put in writing.
Affiliation is still the norm.
About 44,000 colleges were affiliated
in 2021–22.
By January 2026,
1,658 colleges had autonomous status,
and even their degrees still come
from the parent university.
Many colleges are also small.
In the latest official survey,
for 2023–24, nearly 4
in 10 colleges had fewer
than 200 students.
The same survey puts
the enrolment ratio at 30 per cent.
A 2025 NITI Aayog report counted
an average of 260 affiliated colleges
for each state university
in Uttar Pradesh,
on figures for 2021–22.
By December 2024 Maharashtra
had formed four cluster universities
from groups of colleges.
In Odisha, the Khallikote cluster,
set up in 2015,
was dissolved in June 2020,
before the policy was approved.
A. K. Das, then vice-chairman
of Odisha's higher education council,
said in 2021
that the model needs proper regulations
and a funding pattern.
So is bigger better,
or do small colleges lose?
Madhumanjari Mandal spoke in August 2026
as principal of Scottish Church College
in Kolkata,
which has offered 22 subjects
for many years.
She says the multidisciplinary
model has worked smoothly there.
The college is seeking academic autonomy
from 2027, to design its own curriculum
and start new programmes more quickly.
Sukhadeo Thorat,
an economist and former UGC chairman,
starts from access.
The affiliating model, he says,
spreads colleges
across small towns and villages,
and makes access cheap and practical.
Large universities concentrated
in cities would force students to migrate,
pay rent and bear higher living costs.
As of October 2026,
we have found little evidence
on what clusters and mergers
do for students.
Such evidence would show
who enrols afterwards,
how far students travel,
and whether their choice
of subjects widens.
So what can one teacher do?
I cannot build a university.
Find three facts about your college:
whether it is affiliated,
autonomous or constituent,
how many students it has,
and how many disciplines it teaches.
Then ask whether your college
has an institutional development plan.
The policy says faculty take part
in preparing it,
so ask what it says about new departments,
a cluster or autonomy.
And plan one shared session
with a teacher at a nearby institution.
A commerce teacher
in a rural college might pair
with a statistician
at the nearest university,
and a nursing teacher with a sociologist.
There is a college across the road
with a sociology department.
In all these years
I have never been inside it.
Its timetable is on its notice board.
The full text
and our sources are linked below.
Next time, the holistic degree,
and what a broad degree means in practice.