Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill 2025

GS-II – Governance | Higher Education | Regulatory Reforms

Why in News?

• VBSA Bill, 2025: Presently lying in the legislature, the Bill looks to completely revamp the higher education regulatory structure.
• Reform Objective: The reform has been constructed around the promise of:
  • Quality.
  • Accountability.
  • Minimum standards.
  • Prevention of malpractice.
• Principal Question: If regulation can also pose a risk to the value through its yearning to protect it.

Regulation vs Institutional Integrity

• Governmentality: The structural problem is not regulation per se but the form of ‘governmentality’ through which institutional life becomes dominated by a logic of dominance.
• External Supervision: When external supervision takes place to replace internal integrity, the discussion in Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) is about what needs to be minimally maintained on paper.
• Regulatory Fear: Regulatory fear created by the regulator can shake the edifice of HEIs.
• Regulator-Oriented Functionality: HEIs might optimise academic engagement for the regulator, not for teaching and construction of knowledge.
• Paper Compliance: Institutions that follow the prescribed norms, keep files in order and score high on accreditation may win a battle but lose the classroom where critical thinking dies.

Evidence over Learning

• Regulatory Architecture: Important players include:
  • University Grants Commission (UGC).
  • All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
  • National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
  • National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
• More Regulations: Regulations, orders, circulars and guidelines are mouthing rules in an incongruent manner, causing clarifications followed by an irregularity.
• UGC Regulation, 2018: Teachers are supposed to do a 40-hour working week but are on the campus for only five hours every day as per prescribed regulations.
• Arithmetic Exercise: It turns the substance of intellectual engagement into an arithmetic exercise.
• Evidence Blizzard: The result of the system is that it generates a ‘blizzard’ or paper blizzard through digital documents.
• Ranking and Accreditation: University leaders want to maximise institutional scores for rankings and accreditation, not seek understanding of how faculty cultivate thought in engagement with intellectual activity or scholars who might become known among the next generation.

Impact on Teachers and HEIs

• Assembly-Line Model: The assembly-line model of work and the panoptic surveillance through the regulatory architecture creates a trust deficit.
• Risk Aversion: HEIs and teachers indulge in ‘risk aversion’.
• Innovation: Innovation is stifled.
• Conventional Mediocrity: Conventional mediocrity feels like the safest option available.
• Teacher Focus: Teachers focus on what they are required to document for inspection, rather than ask the question, “What makes this worthwhile class; Why am I engaged?”

Counter-Evidence: IISc, IITs, IIMs, NITs and IISERs

• Regulatory Position: IISc, IITs, IIMs, NITs and IISERs are excluded from the mostly regulatory structure in which other HEIs function.
• Institutional Independence: They have the independence of organisations, whereas other institutions need to follow standardised formulas in regulatory institutions.
• Curriculum: They create and revise curriculum as they see fit.
• Recruitment: It is their own different way of recruitment.
• Flexibility in Resource Allocation: They have more freedom to direct resources according to their institutional strategy.
• Counter-Evidence: Intensive regulation should be the main engine of quality; as a matter of fact, universities and HEIs with the sharpest regulatory mechanisms would perform better than these institutions.
• VBSA Concern: Due to the VBSA, if these institutions are also brought inside that regulatory net, we could have yet another casualty coming down our way.

Core Concern for VBSA

• Quality Improvement: The true challenge of VBSA is not to turn improving quality into merely the updating of inspection portals.
• Higher Education: Is the new architecture a bolder home for HEIs, as persuaders of teaching and inquiry?

UPSC Mains Practice Question

Q. “Will regulation become a threat to the very thing it wants to protect?” Discuss with respect to the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan (VBSA) Bill, 2025 and higher education in India.