HRD ministry’s world class institutes proposal reffered to Law ministry for feasibility test

NEW DELHI: Under close PMO scrutiny, the Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry’s proposed regulations for setting up world class institutes have been referred to the Law ministry for opinion on their feasibility under current laws.
Sharp differences over the regulations with the Prime Minister Office had preceded Smriti Irani’s sudden exit from ministry.

The Prakash Javadekar-led HRD ministry is learnt to have referred the draft regulations to the Law ministry seeking clarity on whether such regulations can be formulated at all under provisions available in Section 26 of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956.

Section 26 of the Act empowers UGC to define the minimum standards of instruction for grant of degree by any University and for regulating the maintenance of standards and the co-ordination of work or facilities in Universities. The regulations aim at creating a class of degree granting ‘world class institutes’ as a special category under deemed universities, but governed by a separate set of regulations.

Tentatively named the UGC (Declaration of Educational Institutions as World Class Institutions) Guidelines- these were to create an “enabling regulatory architecture” for 10 public and 10 private institutions to emerge as world-class teaching and research institutions-a budget announcement made by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley this year.

The regulations, however, ran into trouble with the PMO with the latter pushing for greater autonomy and a relaxed regulatory regime allowing institutes freedom to frame own course structure and duration, easing away of penalty clauses and allowing transferring of Letter of Intent from one sponsoring body to another. As per a review of the HRD ministry carried out by the PMO earlier this year, the regulations for the world class institutes were to be readied by August.

Within days of Prakash Javadekar replacing Smriti Irani, the HRD ministry is learnt to have agreed to give in to the PMO on most of the prickly issues, including significantly bringing down the corpus amount from Rs 1,000 crore.