By Ashok Pandey
The Union Minister for Education Dharmendra Pradhan introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, in the Lok Sabha in December 2025. The Bill proposes to do away with multiple regulatory architectures in India’s higher education. The minister proposed to create a single regulatory framework by subsuming the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE). The Bill has been referred to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for detailed examination.
Policy-intellectual moment
The Bill emerges from the reform landscape shaped by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which explicitly called for replacing fragmented, input-driven regulation with a single, light-but-tight regulatory framework that emphasises institutional autonomy, transparency, and outcomes over inspection and control (NEP 2020, Paras 18.2–18.6). The policy acknowledged that multiple regulators with overlapping mandates had led to compliance fatigue, uneven quality, and limited institutional innovation.
This Bill represents a policy-intellectual moment in India’s educational journey. The Narendra Modi government is not only reorganising institutions, but is also articulating its philosophy of regulation, how much autonomy to trust, how much oversight to retain, and how to balance national coherence with academic plurality. India has witnessed moments like this in the university reforms of the 1950s and the expansion of technical education in the 1990s: both reshaped the higher education ecosystem for generations.
An analytical bridge
India is at an inflection point in the governance of knowledge institutions, and the proposed Bill has come at the right time. Hitherto, India’s regulatory ecosystem operated through specialised statutory bodies, each responding to distinct disciplinary and professional needs. The UGC functioned as the principal steward of academic standards, funding norms, and university recognition; the AICTE focused on regulating engineering and technical education with an emphasis on infrastructure, faculty norms, and employability; while the NCTE has the mandate of shaping the professional preparation and pedagogical competence of teachers, the backbone of the education system itself.
Key tension points
The Bill raises fundamental questions:
How will academic freedom and professional autonomy be ensured when regulatory authority is centralised?
How will a consolidated framework maintain disciplinary depth and pedagogical nuance?
And how can a centralised architecture respond meaningfully to the distinct needs of liberal education, professional preparation, teacher education, and advanced research?
These questions point to tensions that are less technical than philosophical. Uniformity can certainly bring order, but higher education has always drawn its strength from context, discipline, and difference. Efficiency may speed up processes and reduce ambiguity, yet education systems also rely on ethical judgement and value-based guidance that cannot be standardised. In much the same way, aspirations of autonomy must be reconciled with the realities of centralised oversight, and regulatory compliance must leave space for institutions to build capacity and mature over time. Whether the Bill will achieve its stated aims will depend on how thoughtfully these tensions are resolved in practice.
The third voice
There is a third voice, between uncritical endorsement and outright resistance, that supports consolidation while insisting on safeguards. Such guardrails include statutory domain-specific councils with genuine academic authority, especially for teacher education and professional disciplines. A clear separation between regulatory compliance and academic guidance must be provided for. Similarly, stakeholder voice and representation, including teachers, researchers, and public universities, must find a place.
As the JPC scrutinises this far-reaching reform, the task before it is to ensure that both centralisation and plurality can coexist within a carefully-designed regulatory architecture. The success of the proposed framework will depend not merely on structural consolidation, but on the guardrails it embeds – guardrails that allow institutions to grow in trust rather than fear.