How regulation stifles HEIs

The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025, which is currently under legislative review, is an attempt to overhaul the regulatory system of higher education. The reformist instinct that induced this move is familiar and based around the same general pillars — to ensure quality, accountability, minimum standards, and to prevent malpractice. Before the floor passes the Bill leading to yet another overarching regulatory apparatus, one question deserves serious scrutiny. Will regulation be a threat to the very quality it claims to protect?

The structural issue is not regulation in itself but the nature of ‘governmentality’ through the dominant logic of institutional life. When external supervision substitutes internal integrity, Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) stop asking what is morally and intrinsically right and start asking only what are the minimum requirements to be maintained on paper. Alan Greenspan, economist and the former Federal Reserve Chair of the U.S., once observed that regulation built on force and fear ignores the moral base of society. Greenspan’s insight is a familiar one in our higher education system: HEIs that meet every prescribed norm and criterion of the regulator, maintain impeccable files, and score high on the accreditation ladder, have classrooms where intellectual engagement lies dormant.

The fear produced by the regulator often undermines the integrity of HEIs and produces a serious pathology: HEIs optimise its academic engagements for the regulator rather than for the process of teaching and construction of knowledge. Under such a regulatory regime, teachers stop asking what makes a class worthwhile or engaging. Instead, they start documenting evidence to satisfy the inspection that awaits them during the annual self-assessment reports. University authorities are not interested in knowing how a faculty member cultivates the intellectual engagement of the students and future scholarship; instead, they are interested in knowing how their institutional scores with respect to ranking and accreditation can be maximised. The result is an ecosystem that nurtures a ‘paper blizzard’ or an evidence blizzard through digital documents.

Evidence over learning

Important players of this regulatory architecture include the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) etc. The various regulations, orders, circulars, and guidelines produced by these regulators often have incongruences in them which lead to clarifications, producing yet more irregularities. For example, the UGC’s Regulation (2018) says that teachers are expected to account for a 40-hour working week while being required to be physically available on campus for only five hours a day. Beyond the internal inconsistency, formulations of this nature risk converting the substance of intellectual engagement into an arithmetic exercise. An assembly line model of work and the panoptic surveillance conducted through the regulatory architecture creates a trust deficit that threatens quality teaching. This results in HEIs and teachers resorting to a mode of ‘risk aversion’, where innovation is stifled, and conventional mediocrity becomes the safest available option.

The strongest counter-evidence to the purported efficiency of the regulatory architecture already exists within our education system. The IISc, IITs, IIMs, NITs, and IISERs operate outside the regulatory architecture of India that governs all other HEIs. These institutions are not bound to follow the standardised formulas of regulatory agencies. They design and update curricula at their own pace, have a different process of recruitment, and enjoy more freedom in directing resources based on their own institutional strategy. If intensive regulatory mechanisms were the real engine of quality, our most tightly regulated universities and HEIs would have been outperforming the IISc, IITs, IIMs NITs and other similar institutions. This shows us that regulatory logic fundamentally misguided our national perspective of ‘quality higher education’. If these institutions are also brought in to the ambit of the regulatory framework through the VBSA, another casualty is awaiting us.

The real test of the VBSA is to avoid reducing quality improvement to the updating of inspection portals, and to ask whether the new architecture can make our HEIs bolder hubs of teaching and inquiry.

Amruth G. Kumar is a Professor, School of Education, Central University of Kerala