Thrust on curricular reforms

Updated on: Friday, March 20, 2009

Setting up of a Higher Education Commission and a call to revitalise undergraduate education are part of the interim recommendations of the Yash Pal committee on ‘Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education in India’. G. MAHADEVAN outlines the details.

For holistic education: MBBS students during a convocation at the Government Medical College, Kottayam, last year. The committee feels that professional institutions should be returned to the universities in ‘a complete administrative and academic sense.’

As was widely expected in the academic circles in the country, the Yash Pal committee on ‘Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education in India’ has in its interim report recommended the setting up of an omnibus Higher Education Commission (HEC) and an immediate stop to the practice of granting the status of deemed universities to institutions.

The final report of the committee set up in 2008 is likely to be submitted in April, 2009.

An “all-encompassing apex body” is how the interim report describes the proposed commission. This body would replace the University Grants Commission and other such regulatory bodies “…with a larger mandate of overseeing all areas of post-secondary education,” the report reads. “The new HEC would be academic in nature and exist to help universities and other centres of learning to identify their roles and activities and in guarding their autonomy and facilitate the distribution of resources available among them, keeping in view their various needs.”

The proposed commission will have curricular reform as its main task. It would create “a curricular framework based on the principles of mobility within a full range of curricular areas and integration of skills with academic depth,” the report notes. The commission will be the premier advisory body to the government on policy issues. It will prepare and present an annual report on the “State of Higher Education” to the nation. In addition to putting in place a curricular framework, the commission would also benchmark universities, compare them with institutions on a global basis, develop requirements of various disciplines, propose new educational policies for the Central and State governments and would evaluate the cost of higher education.

The commission would also be the body that would put in place norms, processes and structures for accrediting universities. (There should be a single-window system for such accreditation.) It would develop sources and mechanisms for funding universities.

At the heart of the 45-page report are calls to recreate the concept of a university and to revitalise undergraduate education. In order to put in place a new “regulatory organisational architecture” for higher education the report recommends that all UGC-like regulatory bodies in the country be divested of their academic functions and those functions be restored to the universities. Universities would have to be made self-regulatory.

The report laments the loss of primacy of the university in the overall scheme of the higher education sector in India and identifies the undermining of undergraduate education as the prime issue of concern in the sector today. Undergraduate courses remain divorced from State universities; members of faculty at universities do not teach undergraduate students. This is illustrative of the ‘perceived hierarchy’ in higher education which treats UG courses as a lower level of learning.

“It should be mandatory for all universities to have a rich undergraduate programme…” the report says.

Undergraduate programmes should be restructured so that students can have access to all disciplines. Moreover, all universities should offer a full range of subjects.

For more information visit: www.thehindu.com

Thrust on curricular reforms

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