"The antics of all the actors - institutes, regulatory agencies, governing councils, directors and sundry other actors, in each of the above case, would be comical, if not for the fact that, they actually are making life hell for a host of students. And in each case, a little regulatory intervention and a little caution from the affected parties would have made life easy for the hapless students."The biggest factor here is the conflict of legislations, which institutions use to their advantage. The game begins with the 2003 UGC notification on private universities(See box below for the relevant excerpts),which clearly states that no private university can ever  set up  any off- campus, off-shore or study centre, anywhere outside the state, in which they were set up, for the first five years of their existence.And this policy is in concurrence with the Supreme Court ruling as well.



 "But the establishment of Distance Education Council (DEC) complicated matters. The DEC norms say nothing about UGC restriction of a minimum five year requirement. So, quite a few private universities had got themselves conveniently registered with DEC. A classic case of taking away with the right hand and giving it back with the left hand.Now private universities have a means to bypass the UGC regulation. Even the UGC notification dated June 11, 2009 says so.  "For   running programmes in distance mode, the approval of Joint Committee of UGC-AICTE-DEC is required. Distance Education Council is the Coordinator of the Joint Committee" . It is this farce of a regulation that enabled the Director of Delhi Business School, Divya Rajput, to inform the Mid-day journalist with injured innocence that "She even offered to shift students to Punjab Technical University".  Unfortunately for her, the students, ungrateful creatures that they are, instead of meekly taking the offer had the guts to refuse it and fight for their rights. So now we have truly reached academic nirvana.  Students are cattle to be auctioned off to the highest bidder (any DEC Accredited University).
 

  The regulatory confusion lies in the joint mechanism of DEC-AICTE and the UGC. Interestingly this evolved from May 10, 2007, and the DEC website displays a fantastic policy statement on how they had arrived at a joint mechanism, so that distance learning permission could be granted through a single window. Point 5 of the document proudly says "As per the recent decision taken in the Joint Committee meeting held on 12th Sept, 2008, the Committee constituted by the Chairman should also include nominees from UGC and AICTE from the panel of experts provided by them, particularly the former in the caseof all Universities and the latter for private institutions offering Professional and Technical Programmes". In other words, UGC does not permit off campus/study centres to be set up by any private university for the first five years of its existence.  But the same experts representing UGC have allowed quite a few private universities to set up distance learning programmes, which could not be effectively run without off campus or at least study centres.

"Now one can appreciate the intend of the UGC regulation. It takes time for an academic institution to establish itself. So ideally it should concentrate on its primary campus for the first five years of its existence. If that is the case how could the DEC bypass that intend and law?  It beats me. We have written to UGC and DEC asking for clarifications. Look out for these pages in the coming issues.

But then in most of these cases, DEC actually has given provisional recognition until the visit of expert committees. If DEC were the licensing authority for motor vehicles, we will have a host of drivers with conditional licenses to drive, subject to passing a test somewhere in the near future. Thankfully it is dealing with harmless issues like higher education and student's future!