500 city colleges to be delinked from varsity

Hemali Chhapia | TIMES NEWS NETWORK

Mumbai: The old British system of affiliating colleges to universities is in the process of being dismantled. Soon, Mumbai’s premier St Xavier’s College and all the 500-odd colleges so far affiliated to the University of Mumbai will no more be tied to the university’s apron strings. Ditto for Miranda House and other Delhi University colleges, Loyola in Chennai and Presidency in Kolkata.

Instead, colleges will now be administered by a new boss, the undergraduate board. The idea is the brainchild of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC). The sole purpose of the undergraduate board is to liberate overburdened universities from the grunt work and tedium of a college overseer, so that they can focus their time and energy on higher callings—research and postgraduate studies.

Experts use a horticultural analogy to describe the current situation—the university, which should have grown into a strong overarching oak tree nurturing an eco-system of colleges, has been reduced to deadwood. It’s time, they say, for both collegiate and university education to bloom.

How Will Students & Institutes Benefit?

The proposed undergraduate board will meet the educational needs of the diverse and growing number of school leavers.

The move will free the parent university to focus on research and post-graduate studies. It will facilitate the entry of new colleges and their affiliation for examinations

The new board will prescribe the conditions of examination, conduct them and also prescribe and update courses

Affiliation an outdated idea: Knowledge panel

Mumbai: The National Knowledge Commission (NKC) proposal for more leeway to parent universities by delinking them from affiliated colleges has gone down surprisingly smoothly, with several states already developing a draft bill and others considering the proposal. Among the states to have responded positively are Delhi, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan and the Union Territory of Puducherry in the south. The lack of opposition would seem to indicate that universities are carrying far too much on their tired shoulders.

The undergraduate board will function like the ICSE or CBSE board and will execute all the responsibilities, academic and administrative, that a university owes to its flock of colleges—curriculum, exams, degrees and finance.

The knowledge commission, which has long called for a division of duties, says that Indian varsities are “no longer able to function efficiently due to immense centralisation and politicisation’’. The commission’s document states, “This system of affiliated colleges for undergraduate education, which may have been appropriate 50 years ago, is neither adequate nor appropriate at this point of time. Quality and excellence are compromised in the effort to meet the needs of one and all. The result often is that everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator and fails to meet special needs or the aspirations of bright students.’’

The NKC, instituted by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and headed by Sam Pitroda, recently completed its tenure and is now working with 26 states and three Union territories to reconfigure education systems. NKC advisors—including S Reghunathan, former Delhi chief secretary, Kiran Datar, former principal of Miranda House, Kumud Bansal, former Union secretary, elementary education, C N S Nair, bureaucrat and economist—have criss-crossed the country to hold meetings and assess the state of university education.