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HECI Bill 2025: Last Twist of Knife on Public Education

Shirin Akhter

Now that the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill, 2025, the renamed Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) Bill, has been formally shared with Members of Parliament, it is both necessary and urgent to read the Bill carefully. What emerges from a section-by-section reading is deeply troubling. This is not a routine regulatory reform. It is a fundamental restructuring of higher education that raises serious concerns about executive overreach, erosion of academic freedom, weakening of federalism, and the systematic exclusion of vulnerable social groups.

At its core, the Bill is not about efficiency or quality. It is about intent.

The HECI Bill resurrects, in spirit, the proposal that was forced off the table in 2018 after unprecedented public resistance. More than one lakh teachers, students, researchers and citizens had then rejected it. That opposition was not reactionary or nostalgic; it was democratic. The response of the present government is telling: erase that memory of resistance, rename the Bill, secure Cabinet approval, and move swiftly before collective opposition can gather again.

The Bill must, therefore, be understood as part of a larger ideological project, one that seeks to centralise power, hollow out federalism, and bring public institutions under tighter political control. By repealing the UGC Act and subsuming multiple regulatory bodies into a single Centrally-controlled authority, the Bill concentrates unprecedented power in the hands of the Union government. This concentration is not accidental. It reflects a deeper hostility toward autonomous institutions, especially universities, which have historically been spaces of debate, dissent and democratic imagination.

The message is unmistakable: universities are no longer to be places where ideas are freely contested. They are to be disciplined, audited and governed from above.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the Bill is the removal of financial powers from the UGC (University Grants Commission) and the transfer of grant allocation to the Ministry of Education or a government-controlled Special Purpose Vehicle. This delinking of funding from regulation effectively weaponises public finance.

In a deeply unequal society, funding decisions are never neutral. Institutions that serve Dalit, Adivasi, OBC (Other Backward Classes), minority and working-class students depend overwhelmingly on public funding. When grants are delayed, made conditional, or withdrawn, the consequences are immediate and visible, fewer scholarships, crumbling hostels, understaffed departments, and rising fees.

For students from privileged backgrounds, higher fees may be inconvenient but for students coming from under-privileged backgrounds, first-generation learners, especially women, these are often decisive. Many simply drop out. What is presented as reform thus deepens existing class, caste and gender hierarchies.

The Bill also empowers the regulator to audit, downgrade or shut down institutions deemed “underperforming.” But underperformance is rarely an abstract failure. It is the predictable result of decades of underfunding and neglect. Rural colleges, women’s colleges, minority institutions and state universities in poorer regions are precisely the institutions that educate the bulk of India’s youth. These are now being set up to fail. Closures or forced mergers will not be replaced by better public alternatives. Entire regions and communities risk losing their only access to higher education.

This is not efficiency. It is educational dispossession.

The centralisation built into the Bill further undermines the federal character of education. State governments, which run and fund the majority of universities and colleges, are reduced to marginal roles, even as decision-making is consolidated in Delhi. States with limited fiscal capacity will be unable to compensate for shrinking Central support. Regional inequalities will deepen. A small number of well-funded metropolitan institutions may flourish, while state-funded colleges quietly wither. The language of “uniform standards” becomes a convenient cover for enforcing unequal outcomes on an uneven field.

The human cost of this restructuring will also be borne by teachers. Audit-driven governance, performance metrics and regulatory threats will make job security even more elusive. The Bill will intensify the already rampant contractualisation of academic labour. Young scholars, women teachers burdened with unpaid care work, and academics from marginalised backgrounds are already disproportionately trapped in insecure positions. Under this regime, the problem will only worsen. Academic freedom becomes a privilege of the few. For the many, silence becomes a survival strategy. Universities cannot produce critical knowledge when fear governs employment.

Institutional autonomy is further hollowed out by the requirement that every regulation framed by the Commission must receive prior approval of the Central government. This opens the door to ideological policing. Universities that encourage research and teaching on caste oppression, gender injustice, communal violence, state repression or economic inequality will find themselves particularly vulnerable. Students from marginalised communities, who have long relied on universities as spaces of intellectual and political empowerment stand to lose the most.

A closer reading of the Bill also raises serious constitutional concerns. Section 45 subordinates the Commission and its Councils to binding “policy directions” of the Central government, while Section 47 empowers the Centre to supersede these bodies altogether and directly assume regulatory control. This concentration of unchecked executive discretion sits uneasily with Article 14’s protection against arbitrariness.

Section 33 authorises heavy financial penalties, withdrawal of grants, revocation of degree-granting powers and even closure of institutions, creating a chilling effect on academic freedom that undermines Article 19(1)(a) in substance, if not in form. Section 49 gives the Act overriding effect over all existing higher-education laws, eroding the federal balance in a domain constitutionally located in the Concurrent List. Uniform regulatory norms imposed on structurally unequal institutions risk indirect discrimination, offending Articles 14 and 15, while the foreseeable contraction of access through closures and fee hikes raises concerns under Article 21’s guarantee of life with dignity, including the right to education and livelihood.

The HECI Bill does not arrive in isolation. It follows the National Education Policy 2020, which has already destabilised higher education through chaotic admissions, unfilled seats under CUET (Central University Entrance Test), rising costs, diluted curricula, shrinking fellowships and institutional mergers. Women students, rural youth, Dalit and Adivasi scholars, and research students dependent on public funding have been hit hardest. The HECI Bill compounds this damage by installing an authoritarian regulator at a moment of systemic fragility.

Why This Bill Must Be Fought

The Cabinet approval of the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill confirms what the manner of its introduction had already made clear: the government is determined to proceed without consent. But consent is not a procedural inconvenience. It is the ethical foundation of democracy. A higher-education system rebuilt through secrecy, exclusion and executive fiat is not reform; it is authoritarian restructuring.

This Bill marks a decisive break from the idea of public education as a social right, won through decades of struggle. It redefines education as a managed, marketised and politically supervised sector. Such transformations are never neutral. Their costs will be borne by working-class students for whom education is a fragile ladder out of poverty; by rural youth whose colleges already struggle to survive; by women students whose access is most sensitive to rising costs; by Dalit, Adivasi and minority communities for whom public universities are rare spaces of mobility and voice; by precariously employed teachers whose livelihoods depend on compliance; and by state institutions without political clout.

To oppose the HECI Bill, therefore, is an act of resistance to the conversion of universities into administrative outposts of the State, resistance to the neoliberal shrinking of public education, and resistance to the authoritarian capture of knowledge itself.

Universities are not factories for producing credentials, nor are they extensions of government departments. These are among the last remaining democratic spaces where ideas can be questioned, hierarchies challenged and alternative futures imagined. When such spaces are brought under centralised bureaucratic control, society loses not only academic freedom, but its capacity for dissent and self-reflection.

If this Bill passes, India will not merely lose a regulator. It will lose a vital public institution that has nurtured critical thought, social movements, scientific inquiry and democratic imagination. The damage will not be immediately visible in rankings or balance sheets. It will unfold slowly, in closed colleges, silenced classrooms and excluded students.

That is why the HECI Bill must be withdrawn. Not postponed. Not cosmetically amended. Withdrawn. Because the future of public higher education, and with it the future of democratic life itself, is too important to be surrendered in silence.

[Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. Courtesy: Newsclick, an Indian news website founded by Prabir Purkayastha in 2009, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief.]

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Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill Seeks to Overhaul Higher Education, Gives Centre Overriding Powers

Sravasti Dasgupta

The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, which seeks to overhaul higher education in India, was introduced in Lok Sabha on Monday (December 15). While Opposition members raised objections to the bill at the introduction stage and accused the Union government of overcentralising education through the proposed legislation – which was also criticised for its Hindi nomenclature – the bill was ultimately sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee.

The bill seeks to repeal the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, the All India Council for Technical Education Act, 1987 and the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993. The bill seeks to set up an apex umbrella body called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan that will provide direction for comprehensive and holistic growth of higher education, along with three councils for regulation, accreditation and ensuring academic standards for universities and higher education institutions (HEI) in India. These will be the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Viniyaman Parishad (the regulatory council), the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Gunvatta Parishad (the accreditation council) and the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Manak Parishad (the standards council).

According to the bill’s Statement of Objects and Reasons, the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 envisions the revision and revamping of all aspects of the education structure, including its regulation and governance, to create a new system that is aligned with the aspirational goals of 21st century education.

It says that the legislation is being brought as the NEP, 2020 “considers that the regulatory system is in need of a complete overhaul in order to re-energise the higher education sector and enable it to thrive”.

“The NEP, 2020 envisions a ‘light but tight’ regulatory framework to ensure integrity, transparency and resource efficiency of the educational system through audit and public disclosure while encouraging innovation and out-of-the- box ideas through autonomy, good governance and empowerment,” it says.

The bill provides that the apex umbrella body, the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan, will consist of a chairperson and 12 other members, all of whom will be appointed by the President of India. The councils will have 14 members and the president and the members of the councils will also be appointed by the President on the recommendation of a search-cum-selection committee of the Union government.

The bill gives overarching powers to the Union government under clauses 45 and 47. The clauses provide that on questions of policy, the each body under the Act will be bound by directions given by the Union government, incase of a disagreement between the Union government and any of the bodies constituted or established under this Act as to whether a question is or is not a question of policy, the decision of the Union government shall be final.

It also says that the Union government may direct the commission or the councils to perform such other functions as it deems fit.

Further, it provides the Union government powers to supersede the commission as well as the councils established under the proposed legislation. It says in Clause 47 that “if at any time central government is of the opinion” that either of the bodies have defaulted in their functions in complying with directions from the Union government it may supersede the commission or the councils.

In such cases of superseding, the bill provides that the chairperson of the commission, or the presidents of the councils and other members of the commission or councils will be asked to vacate their offices, and the Union government will discharge its functions until the reconstitution of the body.

The commission shall be funded by the union government and will have its own fund, being called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Fund.

“The commission shall have its own fund to be called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Fund and all sums which may, from time to time, be granted to it by the central government and all the receipts of the commission and the councils (including any sum which any state government or any other authority or person may deposit) shall be carried to the fund and all payments by the commission and councils shall be made therefrom,” the bill says.

The bill, also in its Statement of Objects and Reasons, says that it has been necessitated due to the expansion of higher education system which has also seen “establishment of several statutory regulatory bodies, requiring multiple approvals by higher educational institutions, inspections, etc., resulting in over-regulation of the sector and duplication of control”.

“There exists a strong need for providing simplified regulatory systems for higher educational institutions in the country,” it says.

However, the bill was opposed at the introductory stage itself with opposition members questioning overcentralisation undermines state governments as well as principles of federalism, while questioning the nomenclature of the bill in Hindi. Union parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju then said that as it is an extensive legislation, it will be sent to a Joint Parliamentary Committee.

[Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia and M. K. Venu.]