The Department of Higher Education of the HRD ministry has recently constituted an over-arching coordinating body called the Higher Education Apex Coordination Committee (HEACC).
The proposed HEACC is intended to remove conflicts among various statutory bodies and promote interdisciplinary learning and research. It stresses on enabling and creating an “environment of joint and cross-disciplinary learning in higher education, especially in emerging and new fields of knowledge, and promote research in universities and higher educational institution with other research agencies”. But the members are from a heavily burdened UGC, future-uncertain AICTE and a registration-centric Council of Architecture. Even without the HEACC, the statutory bodies cited have mutual cooperation in discharging their statutory functions. Though HEACC’s intent is noble, its composition is ignoble and distantly far from its capacity to deliver the desired objective. HEACC should not be a cosmetic arithmetic addition but a pragmatic academic revolution. The chairman of HEACC is the Union HRD minister who can usher this revolution. How?1
That the HEACC is a watered down version of the NCHER is evident from the fact that the order borrows heavily from the Statement of Objects and Reasons of The Higher Education and Research Bill, 2011. The Bill was introduced in Parliament and referred to the Parliamentary Standing Committee, which raised questions about some of its provisions, especially the States’ concerns at their autonomy and jurisdiction in higher education and the practicality of an over-centralised jumbo body.
As the Health Ministry opposed the HRD Ministry’s bid to extend its mandate to health education and the Bar Council of India was worried that the NCHER would encroach on its control over legal education, the attempt to set up the super-regulator was given up earlier this year.2