The Supreme Court (SC) has asked the human resource development (HRD) ministry to upload on internet the Tandon Committee report, on the basis of which the ministry decided to blacklist 44 deemed universities. The SC said it will study the report to examine whether the government has the power to strip universities of their ‘deemed’ status.
A bench of justices Dalveer Bhandari and AK Patnaik on Monday maintained the order of status quo — the situation as prevailed on the day of government’s decision — and fixed April 13 to hear a batch of petitions challenging the government’s mandate. Judges also allowed two weeks to the aggrieved universities to file their responses.
The universities had questioned the government’s authority in passing such an order, which, according to them could only be done by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
The court had stayed the government order in January and also recorded the ministry’s undertaking that about 1.2 lakh students enrolled in the institutes coming under the blacklisted universities would not suffer academically.
The PN Tandon committee submitted its report in October 2009 recommending derecognition of 44 deemed universities. Armed with this report, HRD minister Kapil Sibal announced formulating the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill to scrap the concept of deemed universities.
Government has strongly defended its decision. It said it was more concerned with the academic excellence of these universities, rather than just infrastructural facilities. It has also said the universities listed for de-recognised were being run as family fiefdoms.
A task force set up by the ministry has recommended that the “failed institutions”, which were earlier colleges or state affiliated universities, should be reverted to their original positions and all the students enrolled there must be allowed to complete their studies there. Further, medical and dental colleges that are set to lose the ‘deemed’ status should be enabled to seek recognition from the state university or state’s medical council to help the students.
In cases where institutions can’t get recognition from state authorities, every effort should be made to facilitate migration or re-enrollment of students to equivalent courses in other institutions.
The task force also suggested fresh registration by students of doctoral programmes in affiliated universities. It asked for immediate stoppage of admissions by the failed institutions. The cost of migration and rehabilitation of affected students “should be at the expense of the managements of the failed institutions from the corpus fund”, the task force said.
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