Reading the NEP 14: Who Regulates, Who Governs
English

In many colleges there is a cupboard
of accreditation files,
one for each criterion.
Somebody stayed late
for weeks to fill them.
Ours were sent off last month.
Now the staff room says one
regulator will replace the UGC.
Has it?
As of October 2026, no.
The Bill for a single regulator
is with a committee of Parliament.
The policy's case
for it begins on page 46.
Regulation of higher education
has been too heavy-handed for decades.
Too much has been attempted
to be regulated with too little effect.
Its remedy is to separate four jobs:
regulation, accreditation,
funding and setting academic standards.
Each goes to an independent body,
and the four sit under one umbrella,
the Higher Education Commission of India.
Start with my friend in commerce.
Under this design,
who approves her new course?
The chapter gives no regulator that job.
A General Education Council sets out
what a graduate should know
and be able to do.
Within that framework,
institutions may prepare
their own curricula.
Councils for fields such as agriculture,
teacher education
and architecture help write
that framework,
while having no regulatory role.
And who inspects?
Who reads all those files?
Accreditors do.
Independent bodies, overseen
by a National Accreditation Council,
do the checking,
and accreditation becomes
the main tool of regulation.
Grades come first.
In the long run,
the policy says,
it becomes a plain yes or no.
The regulator itself is to work
through disclosure.
Every institution must publish
its finances, audits, faculty,
courses and outcomes on a public website.
The policy calls this light but tight:
a few important matters,
regulated very effectively.
To make institutions meet basic norms,
it promises strict compliance measures
and stringent action,
with penalties for false disclosure.
One regulatory council is to cover
all of higher education except medicine
and law.
The funding arm,
a grants council,
is to fund institutions
on transparent criteria,
including their development plans.
And every institution,
public or private,
is to meet not-for-profit
standards of audit,
with any surplus put back into education.
And the board
our principal keeps mentioning?
Who appoints that?
In chapter 19,
every institution is to aim,
over 15 years, to earn its autonomy
through graded accreditation.
By 2035 it is to have a Board of Governors
that runs it free of external interference
and appoints its head.
The board then renews itself:
its own expert committee finds new
members, and the board selects them.
Who sets up the first board is left
to a law the policy promises.
A board that picks its own members,
and my principal.
Where are the teachers in that?
That paragraph does not mention them.
Faculty appear once in the chapter:
the institution's development plan
is to be prepared jointly by the board,
its leaders,
faculty, students and staff.
The grants council is to weigh
that plan when it funds the institution.
As of October 2026, none
of the new bodies exists.
The UGC and the councils
for technical education
and teacher education still regulate.
Under its 2025 regulations,
the UGC can debar an institution
from offering degrees.
A Bill to replace them,
the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill,
was introduced in the Lok Sabha
on 15 December 2025.
The next day it went
to a joint committee of Parliament.
As of October 2026
the committee has not reported,
and the Bill has not been passed.
As introduced,
the Bill keeps much of the outline:
one commission,
with councils for regulation,
accreditation and standards.
Medicine, law
and some other professional courses stay
outside it.
It has no grants council.
Grants
to centrally funded institutions would go
through the Ministry of Education,
and appeals against the commission
would go to the central government.
The councils for regulation and standards
each have one seat for a state nominee,
which the states take in turn.
Accreditation is still done
by the National Assessment
and Accreditation Council.
After a bribery case
in 2025, it stopped accrediting
for several months.
In December 2025 it was still
giving letter grades,
and the yes-or-no system had not begun.
As of October 2026,
the law the policy promised for boards
of governors has not been passed.
And most colleges are still affiliated
to a university.
On vice-chancellors,
a UGC draft of January 2025 would give
the chancellor's nominee
the chair of the search committee.
Six states asked for its withdrawal.
As of October 2026,
that draft is not on the UGC's
list of regulations.
So would one regulator free colleges
like mine,
or tie us tighter to Delhi?
Jamshed Bharucha,
founding vice-chancellor of Sai University
in Chennai,
wrote in 2024
that heavy and rigid regulation
had held Indian higher education back.
The balance between policing
and facilitation, he wrote,
had long leaned towards policing.
He read the policy as a break with that,
and pointed to the IITs as evidence
that autonomy brings excellence.
N. V. Varghese,
founder-director of the Centre
for Policy Research in Higher Education,
said in September 2026
that the policy had promised four arms.
One of them was for funding.
Taking funding out, he said,
concentrates authority and power
without financial responsibility.
A university's autonomy,
he added, depends on how it is funded.
I cannot vote on a Bill.
What can I do from my department?
Find out which bodies
your programme answers to today.
History
in an affiliated rural college answers
to its university and the UGC.
Teacher education
in a state university also answers
to the national council
for teacher education.
Then read what your institution publishes
about your department,
on its website
and in its accreditation files.
In the policy's design,
that public record
is what the regulator checks,
so it should be accurate.
And ask to see
the institution's development plan,
and what it says about your department.
The policy wants faculty
among its authors,
and the UGC issued guidelines
for these plans in February 2024.
Our website says
the department has nine teachers.
We have five,
and two of them are guest faculty.
Then the record needs a correction.
The full text
and our sources are linked below.
Next time, money,
timelines and what you can do.