The University Grants Commission Act, 1956 has been marked for abolition by expert committees, by a government draft bill and by a national education policy, and it remains the statute under which Indian higher education is governed. That survival is the puzzle this article explains. The UGC Act 1956 endures because the two powers that give the Commission its real grip on the system are not the powers its critics usually attack. The Commission is attacked as a funder, accused of running an inspection regime and of writing micro-managerial rules. Its grip, however, comes from a monopoly and a pen: the statutory rule that nobody outside a closed list of institutions may confer a degree, and the power to make regulations that carry the force of law on qualifications, standards and the conditions on which institutions may teach. Every proposal to abolish the Commission has foundered on the same unasked question, which is who would hold those two powers the morning after abolition, and under what statute.

The article that follows is the pillar treatment of the statute for this cluster. It reads the Act as a working machine rather than as a chapter list: the constitutional entry that lets Parliament legislate on university standards at all, the composition of the Commission and the constraints built into that composition, the functions provision in Section 12 and the grant machinery that runs off it, the inspection power and its deliberately weak sanction, the degree provisions in Sections 22 to 24 that decide what a qualification legally is, the deemed university route in Section 3 and the scandal and litigation it produced, the rule and regulation powers in Sections 25 and 26 and the large body of subordinate legislation made under them, the fee provision inserted in 1984 and the reasons it has slept, the case law that fixed the boundary between the Commission and the states, and the seventy-year argument about whether the body should exist at all. The claim to hold throughout is the one the brief for this article names: the power is in the degree, not the grant.

Before the Act: a grants committee in search of a statute

The Commission began as an administrative creation, not a statutory one. The University Education Commission appointed in November 1948 under the chairmanship of Dr S. Radhakrishnan reported in August 1949 and recommended, among much else, that India create a body on the model of the British University Grants Committee to distribute public money to universities and to watch over standards while keeping a buffer between the universities and the government of the day. The recommendation fitted the British idea that a grants body staffed by academics could fund universities without directing them, and it answered a practical problem of the new republic: university education was a provincial and then a state subject administered by governments that had neither the money nor the machinery to coordinate a national system, while the Union government had the money and a constitutional interest in standards but no direct administrative route into state universities.

The first step was taken without legislation. The University Grants Commission was inaugurated on 28 December 1953 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Union Minister of Education, as a body set up by executive resolution. For three years it operated on that footing, advising on grants and beginning the work of coordination, but an executive body could not do the two things the scheme eventually required. It could not bind anyone, and it could not speak with statutory authority about what a university was or what a degree was. Only Parliament could create those powers, and Parliament’s competence to create them depended on a specific entry in the Union List, to which this article returns below.

The statutory step followed quickly. The University Grants Commission Act, 1956, Act 3 of 1956, received the assent of the President on 3 March 1956 and was brought into force on 5 November 1956 by notification. Its long title states its whole theory in one line: an Act to make provision for the coordination and determination of standards in universities and for that purpose to establish a University Grants Commission. Coordination and determination of standards are the two functions the Constitution assigns to the Union in this field, and the Act never claims more. It does not create universities, it does not administer them, and it does not appoint their officers. Everything the Commission does is done through the three instruments the Act gives it: money, advice backed by inspection, and regulations backed by the degree monopoly. The history of the Act is the history of those three instruments being used with very different degrees of success.

The first chairman of the statutory Commission was Dr C. D. Deshmukh, a former finance minister, and the choice signalled the body’s original centre of gravity: it was imagined first as a grants commission, a finance body with academic membership, and only second as a regulator. That ordering explains much of what followed. The funding function came with staff, procedures and a constituency; the standards function had to be built later, largely through regulations, and it grew in the interstices of a statute whose text treats regulation as a supporting instrument of coordination rather than as an end in itself. Readers who want the school-level counterpart of this settlement, where Parliament legislated a right and a set of norms for elementary education two generations later, will find it in the treatment of the Right to Education Act, which works through a state-list-turned-concurrent subject by an entirely different technique.

The constitutional foundation: Entry 66 and the standards power

Parliament’s authority to enact the UGC Act rests on Entry 66 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule, which gives the Union power to legislate for the coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions. The entry is narrow and it is deliberate. The Constitution’s framers placed education generally with the provinces, and the entry carves out of that general allocation a single Union function: whatever else belongs to the states, the coordination of a national system and the determination of the standards that make a degree from one university intelligible to another belong to the Centre. A degree is a national currency. It is presented for employment and for further study across state lines, and a system in which each state defined the value of that currency for itself would have no currency at all. Entry 66 is the constitutional recognition of that fact.

Two later developments changed the frame without changing the entry. The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 moved education from the State List to the Concurrent List, where it sits as Entry 25, expressly made subject to Entries 63 to 66 of the Union List. The consequence is a layered competence: states may legislate on education, including on the establishment and administration of their universities, but where the field is the determination of standards in higher education, the Union entry prevails and central legislation occupies it. The division of competence between the two levels, the doctrine of repugnancy that polices it, and the question of how far a central standards law may reach into the internal governance of a state university are the subject of a separate article in this series, which owns the federalism analysis; the treatment of education in the Concurrent List works through that competence question in full. What the present article needs from the constitutional frame is the narrower proposition the courts have built on Entry 66, stated in the case-law section below: regulations made by the Commission under the Act are treated as law made under the standards entry, and in the field of standards they prevail over inconsistent state provisions, while the establishment, incorporation and ordinary administration of state universities remain with the states.

That boundary, between standards at the centre and administration in the states, is the line on which almost every live dispute under this Act is fought. It explains why the Commission can prescribe the qualifications of a professor in a state university but cannot decide which college a state university affiliates, why it can specify the composition of the search committee that recommends a vice chancellor but cannot appoint one, and why the fiercest resistance to its regulations comes precisely where a regulation about standards begins to look like a decision about governance. The Act itself draws the line only implicitly, through the list of functions in Section 12 and the subjects of regulation in Section 26. The courts drew it explicitly, and the drawing is one of the more consequential pieces of judge-made federalism in Indian education law.

The body the Act creates: composition, tenure and accountability

Section 4 establishes the Commission as a body corporate with perpetual succession and a common seal. The composition sits in Section 5, and it deserves attention because Section 5 as it stands is not the section Parliament enacted in 1956. The original scheme had nine members appointed by the Central Government: not more than three vice chancellors, two officers of the Central Government, and the remainder educationists of repute, with at least half of the whole number drawn from outside government service, and a chairman nominated from among the non-official members. The University Grants Commission (Amendment) Act, 1972, Act 33 of 1972, substituted Section 5 with effect from 17 June 1972 and produced the structure that has governed since: a Chairman, a Vice-Chairman and ten other members, all appointed by the Central Government. The Chairman must be chosen from among persons who are not officers of the Central Government or of any state government. Of the ten other members, two represent the Central Government as its officers, not less than four must be teachers of universities at the time of their choice, and the remainder are drawn from persons with knowledge or experience of agriculture, commerce, forestry or industry, from the engineering, legal, medical and other learned professions, and from vice chancellors and educationists of repute, with at least half of that remainder group also drawn from outside government.

The design is worth reading slowly, because it encodes the body’s intended character. The Commission is an appointed body, appointed entirely by one government, yet the statute rations the government’s own presence inside it: two officers among twelve, a chairman barred from being a serving officer, a statutory floor of serving teachers, and a statutory floor of non-officials in the outside group. Parliament wanted a body close enough to government to distribute public money and distant enough from it to be believed when it spoke about standards. Every subsequent criticism of the Commission’s independence, and every proposal to replace it with a body appointed through a search committee or a collegium, is a criticism of the settlement Section 5 records: the appointing power is unqualified, the qualifications for membership are general, and nothing in the Act prevents a government from treating the Commission as a posting ground. The statute builds the buffer out of numbers and categories rather than out of process, and numbers and categories are only as strong as the appointments made under them.

Tenure and machinery are dealt with briefly. Section 6 gives members a term of six years, subject to disqualifications prescribed by rules, with a staggering device for the first appointments; the chairman’s office is whole-time and salaried. Section 9 lets the Commission associate outside persons with its work for particular purposes, without a vote. Section 10 provides for a secretary and staff, appointed by the Commission under rules made by the Central Government. Section 11 deals with authentication of orders. None of this is glamorous, but it matters to the pillar reading of the Act: the Commission’s working capacity, its committees and panels and visiting teams, rests on the association power in Section 9 and the staff power in Section 10, and the quality of its regulation has always tracked the quality of the expert labour it could associate with itself.

Accountability runs through the finance and reporting provisions. Under Section 15 the Central Government pays the Commission, after due appropriation by Parliament, such sums as are considered necessary for the performance of its functions. Section 16 constitutes the Fund of the Commission, into which central payments and other receipts are carried and out of which all payments are made. Section 17 requires a budget, Section 18 an annual report laid before both Houses of Parliament, and Section 19 accounts audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. Section 21 obliges the Commission to furnish the Central Government with such returns and information as it requires. The Commission is therefore accountable upward, to the government that funds it and to Parliament through the laying of its report and audit, and it is not accountable downward to the universities it regulates except through the consultation duties the Act writes into its functions. That asymmetry is structural, and it is one root of the complaint that the Commission behaves as an arm of the ministry rather than as the universities’ own coordinating body.

Is the University Grants Commission a constitutional body?

No. The Commission is a statutory body, created by the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, Act 3 of 1956, and it exists only because Parliament enacted that statute. Constitutional bodies such as the Election Commission are created by the Constitution itself; the Commission could be abolished by an ordinary Act of Parliament.

The distinction has practical consequences. Because the Commission’s existence and powers are statutory, Parliament may reshape them by amendment, as it did in 1972 and 1984, and may repeal the Act altogether, as draft bills have repeatedly proposed. But the same point cuts the other way for universities: until Parliament acts, the Commission’s statutory powers bind with the full force of a central law, and neither a state government nor a university can treat the body as a mere advisory committee whose advice may be noted and filed. The Commission’s authority is borrowed entirely from the Act, and the Act is the measure of it in both directions.

Can the Central Government direct the University Grants Commission?

Yes, within limits set by Section 20. In discharging its functions the Commission must be guided by directions on questions of policy relating to national purposes given by the Central Government, and if the two disagree about whether a question is such a policy question, the decision of the Central Government is final.

Section 20 is the quiet answer to the question whether the Commission is independent. It is not independent in the sense in which a constitutional body is independent. It is a statutory body working under a policy-direction power, softened in practice by the composition rules in Section 5, by the convention that directions are rare and general, and by the professional standing of its members. The direction power is framed for questions of policy relating to national purposes and the Act gives the government’s reading of that phrase finality in case of dispute, so the legal space for a Commission that wished to defy its funder is small. What protects universities in practice is not a legal wall but the structure of the functions themselves, most of which are advisory, allocative and regulatory rather than executive, so that a direction can set policy but cannot easily mark an examination paper.

The scheme of the UGC Act 1956 as enacted

The Bill that became the Act announced its objects in terms that the finished statute kept, and the objects repay reading because they show the degree provisions were not an afterthought but part of the original design. The prefatory material of the Act records that the Bill sought to restrict the use of the word university and the power to confer degrees to institutions established as such by law or empowered to do so by an Act of Parliament, and to provide a penalty for contravention by an individual or a corporate body. It also recorded the division of labour that Section 3 embodies: the provisions of the Bill did not apply to institutions of higher education that were not universities, but power was vested in the Central Government to declare an institution for higher education to be a university for the purposes of the Act by notification in the Gazette. The architecture of 1956 was therefore complete from the start: a grants and coordination body, a closed definition of the university, a controlled exception administered by declaration, a prohibition protecting the name, and a penalty. What seventy years added was not new architecture but weight: amendments that widened the composition, gated the grants, armed the fee field and enlarged the regulation power, and a superstructure of regulations, lists and machinery that the bare sections merely authorise. A reader who wishes to understand why the Act is so difficult to repeal should begin there. The statute to be replaced is not the twenty-eight sections. It is the twenty-eight sections plus everything that has been lawfully built on them, and a repeal bill that does not carry the superstructure across has repealed the foundation and left the building standing in the air.

The long expansion: the Commission and the growth of the system

The Act was written for a small system and has governed a mass one, and the distance between the two is the background against which every provision must be read. The university world of 1956 was a world of a few dozen universities and a few hundred colleges, publicly funded, residential in aspiration, and small enough for a commission of twelve to know its vice chancellors by name. The Education Commission of 1964 to 1966, chaired by Dr D. S. Kothari, planned the first great expansion and treated the grants commission as essential machinery for it, recommending that support for universities flow through a body of academic standing rather than through departmental routine, and the decades that followed multiplied universities, then colleges, then enrolments, in waves driven by state politics, private initiative and demographic demand. The Commission’s statutory instruments did not change with the scale. A general duty framed for coordination among dozens of institutions was asked to determine standards among more than a thousand universities and tens of thousands of colleges, and the predictable adaptations followed: the Commission governed increasingly through paper, through regulations of general application, pro formas, committees of visitors and the conditions attached to grants, because no body of its size can govern a mass system by knowledge of the institutions in it.

Massification also changed the politics around the Act. In a small system the Commission’s interlocutors were the Union government and a handful of state governments of similar outlook. In a mass system every state government is a university founder, every legislature a source of new university Acts, and every admission season a demonstration that seats in recognised institutions are the scarcest good in the middle-class economy. The pressures that produced the deemed university inflation, the multiplication of private universities by state legislation, and the litigation over vice chancellor appointments are all pressures of scale acting on a statute written for scarcity of institutions rather than scarcity of seats. The Act’s definitions held under the pressure, which is its achievement; its supervisory instruments did not, which is its indictment; and the distance between the definition and the supervision is the space in which the Indian higher education quality debate has been conducted for forty years.

The amendment arc: 1972 and 1984

The Act has never been comprehensively revised, and its amendment history is short enough to state in full, which is itself a fact about Indian higher education: the governing statute of a system that grew from a few hundred institutions to tens of thousands was substantively amended twice.

The University Grants Commission (Amendment) Act, 1972, Act 33 of 1972, in force from 17 June 1972, did three things of lasting importance. It substituted Section 5 and created the modern composition of Chairman, Vice-Chairman and ten members. It adjusted the grant clauses of Section 12 and inserted Section 12B, the fitness gate discussed below, under which no grant from the Central Government, the Commission or any organisation receiving central funds may be given to a university established after the commencement of the 1972 amendment unless the Commission has declared it fit to receive such a grant; the provision was originally numbered Section 12A and was renumbered as Section 12B in 1984. And it inserted Section 27, a power for the Commission to delegate its power of general superintendence and direction over its own business by regulations. The 1972 changes belong to the period in which the state was tightening its hold on the university system, and the fitness gate in particular converted the Commission from a body that advised on grants into a body whose declaration was a legal precondition of grants to new universities.

The University Grants Commission (Amendment) Act, 1984, Act 59 of 1984, in force from 1 October 1984, is the amendment that built the modern regulatory statute. It inserted clause (ccc) into Section 12, empowering the Commission to establish institutions for providing common facilities, services and programmes for a group of universities or for universities in general, the provision under which the inter-university centres and common facilities of the system were later built. It inserted Section 12A, the fee regulation and donation prohibition provision analysed in its own section of this article. It renumbered the fitness gate as Section 12B. It expanded the regulation-making power in Section 26, adding clauses on the establishment of the common-facility institutions, on fee matters and on the manner of inquiry under Section 12A, and it gave the regulation power a limited capacity for retrospective effect, from a date not earlier than the commencement of the Act, provided no person’s interests are prejudicially affected. Read together, the amendments of 1972 and 1984 shifted the Act’s centre of gravity from coordination to gatekeeping: after 1984 the Commission held a fitness gate over grants, a fee and donation power over colleges, a machinery for building shared academic infrastructure, and a wider regulation power, all inside a statute whose preamble still speaks the mild language of coordination and determination of standards.

Has the UGC Act been amended in any major way since 1956?

Twice in substance. The Amendment Act of 1972 recast the Commission’s composition, tightened the grant clauses and created a fitness gate for grants to new universities. The Amendment Act of 1984 added the fee and donation provision, the power to build common facilities and a wider regulation-making power.

The absence of later structural amendment is part of the story of the Act. Parliament has legislated around the Commission rather than through it: new kinds of institutions were given their own statutes, professional education was given its own councils (the teacher education council’s statute is treated in the article on the National Council for Teacher Education Act, the parallel regulator in this cluster), and the general statute of 1956 was left to carry a system many times the size of the one it was written for. The reform debate recorded later in this article is therefore not a debate about amending the Act. It is a debate about repealing it, which is a different and harder thing, and the difficulty of that harder thing is one reason the debate has lasted so long without a conclusion.

Section 12: the functions, and the general duty behind them

Section 12 opens with the general duty, and the drafting repays attention. It is the general duty of the Commission to take, in consultation with the universities or other bodies concerned, all such steps as it may think fit for the promotion and coordination of university education and for the determination and maintenance of standards of teaching, examination and research in universities. Three features of that sentence drive the whole Act. The duty is framed in the language of judgment, “all such steps as it may think fit”, which gives the Commission a wide discretion and makes its choices hard to challenge as beyond power. The duty is conditioned by consultation, which builds the universities into the process and gives a university that was never consulted a procedural argument. And the duty’s objects are promotion and coordination on one side and determination and maintenance of standards on the other, a pairing that maps exactly onto the Commission’s dual character as funder and regulator.

The enumerated powers that follow are a mixture of money, advice and information. Clause (a) empowers inquiry into the financial needs of universities. Clauses (b) and (c) are the grant powers: the Commission may allocate and disburse, out of its Fund, grants to universities established under a Central Act for maintenance and development or any other general or specified purpose, and grants to other universities as it deems necessary or appropriate for development or for the maintenance or development of specified activities, giving due consideration in the second case to the development of the university, its financial needs, the standard attained by it and the national purposes it may serve. Clause (cc), inserted in 1972, extends the grant power to institutions deemed to be universities, for maintenance in special cases, for development, or for any other general or specified purpose. Clause (ccc), inserted in 1984 and discussed in the amendment section above, empowers the Commission to establish institutions providing common facilities, services and programmes for groups of universities, an apparently administrative power out of which grew the shared infrastructure of the system, its information and library networks, its inter-university centres for subjects no single university could sustain, and its common academic services.

The advisory powers occupy clauses (d) to (g). The Commission may recommend to any university the measures necessary for the improvement of university education and advise it on implementation; advise the Central Government or any state government on the allocation of grants to universities out of the Consolidated Fund of India or of a state; advise any authority that asks on the establishment of a new university or the expansion of an existing one; and advise governments and universities on any question referred to it. Clauses (h) and (i) are the information powers, and they are stronger than they look: the Commission may collect information on university education in India and other countries and make it available, and it may require a university to furnish information on its financial position, on the studies in the various branches of learning it undertakes, and on all its rules and regulations relating to standards of teaching and examination in each branch. The power to require information is the factual foundation of regulation, because a standards body that cannot compel the production of the standards documents is regulating blind. Clause (j) is the residuary power to perform such other functions as may be prescribed or as may be deemed necessary for advancing the cause of higher education in India.

The grant clauses also explain a feature of the system that puzzles outsiders: the Commission’s money reaches only part of the field it regulates. Grants to universities established under Central Acts are the core of clause (b); grants to state universities under clause (c) are discretionary development assistance, given for specified purposes and activities, and the maintenance costs of state universities, the salaries of their teachers and the running of their affiliated colleges, are borne by state governments and by fees. The Commission’s Fund is therefore a development fund laid over a system financed by others, and the modesty of the sums relative to the system’s size is the factual background of the funder-regulator debate: the Commission’s financial lever is weakest exactly where most students are taught, in the state universities and their colleges, and strongest in the small central sector. A regulator whose money touches a minority of the regulated field must regulate by norm or not at all, which is another route to the conclusion this article keeps reaching, that the operative powers of the Act are the definitional and regulatory ones.

Two things are absent from Section 12, and the absences are as instructive as the contents. The section contains no power to close a university, no power to withdraw recognition in general terms, no power to appoint or remove any university officer, and no power to affiliate or disaffiliate a college, which remains a function of universities under their own Acts. And the section contains no power expressed in the language of command directed at a university’s academic decisions: the operative verbs are inquire, allocate, recommend, advise, collect, require information and perform. The Commission’s coercive instruments lie elsewhere in the Act, in the grant gate of Section 12B, the withholding power of Section 14, the fee sanction of Section 12A and, above all, in the regulations contemplated by Section 26 and the degree provisions of Sections 22 to 24. A reader who confines attention to Section 12 will conclude that the Commission is a advisory and allocative body of modest force. A reader who reads the Act whole will see that Section 12 is the chassis and the engine is fitted elsewhere.

Does a university need the permission of the UGC to come into existence?

No. A university comes into existence by legislation, through a central, provincial or state Act that establishes or incorporates it, and the Commission neither grants nor withholds that legal birth. What the Commission controls is the consequences: recognition, fitness for grants and the standards regime that the new university must meet.

That distinction, between existence and recognition, is the single most common point of confusion in public writing about this Act, and it propagates real harm. Promoters announce that an institution is “UGC approved” as though the Commission had licensed it into being, and students read the announcement as a guarantee. The Act gives the Commission no licensing power over the creation of universities. A state legislature may create a university by Act even where the Commission’s advice, sought under clause (f) of Section 12 on the establishment of a new university, was unfavourable. What the Commission can then do is refuse the declaration of fitness that Section 12B makes a precondition of central grants, decline recognition of the institution’s qualifications for purposes within its remit, and report on the institution’s standards. The institution exists; its degrees, if it is a university within Section 2(f), are degrees in law; and the system’s protection against a weak university is not a birth licence but the combination of the grants gate, the information power and public reporting. Whether that combination is adequate is a genuine question, and the deemed university episode examined below is the strongest evidence that ex post control is weaker than ex ante control. But the question cannot even be framed until the distinction between establishment and recognition is kept clear.

Inspection, recommendation and the withholding power

Section 13 gives the Commission its inspection power, carefully hedged. For the purpose of ascertaining the financial needs of a university or its standards of teaching, examination and research, the Commission may, after consultation with the university, cause an inspection of any department or departments to be made in the prescribed manner by persons it directs. The university must be told the date and is entitled to be associated with the inspection. The Commission communicates its views on the results, may after ascertaining the university’s opinion recommend action, and the university’s executive authority must report what action is proposed in response. The architecture is deliberative: consultation before, association during, opinion before recommendation, report after. An inspection under Section 13 is not a raid and issues in no order.

Section 14 then attaches the only sanction the Act provides for ignoring the Commission’s recommendations. If a university fails within a reasonable time to comply with a recommendation made under Section 12 or Section 13, the Commission, after considering any cause the university shows for its failure, may withhold from the university the grants proposed to be made out of the Fund of the Commission. Notice the limits. The sanction is financial, not academic: the Commission cannot annul an examination, cancel an appointment or dissolve a syndicate. It is confined to grants out of the Commission’s own Fund, so its bite depends entirely on how much of the university’s income flows through that Fund, which for a central university is a great deal and for a state university teaching mostly through affiliated colleges may be a modest development grant. And it requires a prior recommendation, a reasonable time, and consideration of the cause shown, so it is a considered withholding rather than a penalty. Section 14 is the clearest textual evidence for the proposition that the funding lever, standing alone, was never designed to be the Commission’s real power. A sanction that reaches only money the Commission itself would have paid, and only after a process of recommendation and explanation, is a lever for negotiation. The provisions that behave like law, with consequences a university cannot negotiate away, are the degree provisions and the regulations.

In practice the inspection power has been used chiefly as the evidentiary basis of the grant and fitness functions, through visiting committees whose reports inform decisions on development assistance, on the declaration of fitness and on the recognition of colleges for grant purposes, rather than as a freestanding standards police. The withholding power of Section 14 has been used sparingly, and the reasons are visible in its design: a university that has ignored a recommendation is usually a university whose finances do not depend on the Commission’s development grants, while a university that does depend on them is usually too weak to be improved by their withdrawal. The sanction therefore sits in the Act as a reserve power whose existence disciplines negotiation more than its use disciplines universities. That is not a drafting failure so much as a truthful expression of the federal facts: the Commission’s recommendations are addressed, in the main, to institutions owned by other governments, and a central standards body in a federation governs such institutions by norm, by information and by the downstream refusal of its definitions, and only exceptionally by money.

Section 12B, the fitness gate inserted in 1972 and renumbered in 1984, completes the funding architecture. No grant shall be given by the Central Government, the Commission, or any other organisation receiving funds from the Central Government, to a university established after the commencement of the 1972 Amendment Act, unless the Commission has, after satisfying itself as to prescribed matters, declared the university fit to receive the grant. Where Section 14 withholds money from a university that will not listen, Section 12B prevents money reaching a new university that has not been examined. Between them they make the Commission the gatekeeper of central money for the university system, and the declaration of fitness under Section 12B, paired with inclusion of the university in the Commission’s list under the definition in Section 2(f), became the working test that students, employers and other governments use for whether a university is inside the recognised system. The Act does not use the word recognition in that connection at all. Practice built the concept out of the definition, the fitness gate and the list, which is a reminder that in this field the operative law is often the accumulated practice under a statute rather than any single clause in it.

The degree monopoly: Sections 22, 23 and 24

The heart of the Act is Chapter IV’s short run of provisions on degrees, and it is three sections long. Section 22(1) provides that the right of conferring or granting degrees shall be exercised only by a university established or incorporated by or under a Central Act, a provincial Act or a State Act, by an institution deemed to be a university under Section 3, or by an institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament to confer or grant degrees. Section 22(2) provides that, save as provided in the first sub-section, no person or authority shall confer or grant, or hold himself or itself out as entitled to confer or grant, any degree. Section 22(3) confines the word degree itself: for the purposes of the section, degree means any such degree as may, with the previous approval of the Central Government, be specified by the Commission by notification in the Official Gazette. The Commission therefore not only polices who may award a degree; it specifies, with central approval, what counts as one, and the nomenclature of degrees, the bachelors and masters and doctorates and their named variants that employers and universities recognise, is a matter of central specification rather than institutional invention.

Section 23 protects the word. No institution, corporate or otherwise, other than a university established or incorporated by or under a Central, provincial or State Act shall be entitled to have the word university associated with its name in any manner whatsoever; the proviso spared institutions that already carried the word for two years from commencement. Section 24 supplies the penalty, and its modesty is one of the famous facts of this statute: whoever contravenes Section 22 or Section 23 is punishable with a fine that may extend to one thousand rupees, and where the contravener is an association or body of individuals, every member who knowingly or wilfully authorises or permits the contravention is liable to the same fine.

Read as a scheme, these provisions do something more subtle than their penalty suggests. They define a closed class and attach the entire downstream value of a qualification to membership of it. A degree from inside the class is a degree for admission to other universities, for public employment that requires a degree, and for professional enrolment where a degree is the qualifying condition. A certificate from outside the class, however rigorous the course behind it, is not a degree in law, whatever its cover says. The sanction for breaching the monopoly is trivial as a fine, and one thousand rupees has never been revised in a statute enacted when that sum was worth revising for, so the provision is routinely cited as proof that the Act is toothless. That reading misses where the enforcement actually happens. The fine is the least of it. The real consequences are that the qualification is worthless for the purposes that make students buy it, that the Commission names the institution on its published list of fake universities, and that the students, once alerted, sue and complain and leave. The monopoly works by definition rather than by prosecution, which is why it has survived a penalty figure that would not cover the cost of the paper an offending prospectus is printed on. It is also why the successor bills matter so much: the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, discussed below, would replace the one-thousand-rupee ceiling with penalties running from ten lakh rupees to two crore rupees, a change its supporters describe as giving the definition teeth at last.

The third route in Section 22(1), the institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament, deserves its own sentence because it is the route by which Parliament has repeatedly escaped the university form altogether. The institutes of technology, the institutes of management and other institutions of national importance confer degrees not because they are universities but because their own Acts empower them to, and the family resemblance and differences among those institution statutes is the subject of the comparison of central institution Acts. The degree-granting sentence in the career of the Indian Institutes of Management, which for decades awarded diplomas because they were societies rather than universities and which received degree power only from their own Act of 2017, is traced in the article on the IIM Act and institutional autonomy. Both routes confirm the same structural point: in Indian law a degree is a creature of statute, and the question is never whether an institution is good enough to award one but always which statute says it may.

What makes a degree valid

The practical question the Act answers, and the question with the highest stakes for the largest number of readers, is whether a given qualification is a degree in law. The answer is a routing exercise through the institution’s legal basis, and it is set out here in the form this cluster reserves for its findable artifact.

Legal basis of the institution	May it confer a degree?	What it may award if not	How a student verifies	Recourse if the qualification is not a degree
A university established or incorporated by a Central, provincial or State Act, within the meaning of Section 2(f)	Yes. Section 22(1) gives the right to universities in this class	Not applicable	Find the establishing Act; check the university appears in the Commission’s published list of universities and holds the Section 12B fitness declaration if established after the 1972 amendment	Approach the university’s grievance machinery, then the Commission; a degree from this class is valid and the dispute will concern the programme, not the degree
An institution declared deemed to be a university under Section 3	Yes, while the declaration stands. The institution is treated as a university for the purposes of the Act	Not applicable	Find the Gazette notification of the declaration; check the institution against the regulations governing deemed universities and the Commission’s list	Verify the declaration covered the programme and the period of study; on withdrawal of status the protection of students already enrolled is the operative question
An institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament, such as the institutes created by the institution Acts	Yes, to the extent its own Act empowers it	Not applicable	Read the empowering Act, which states the degree power expressly	The qualification stands or falls by the empowering Act; disputes go to the institution’s own statutory machinery
A college affiliated to a university	No. The college teaches; it does not award	Nothing in its own name; its students receive the degree of the affiliating university	Confirm the affiliation with the university for the course and the year of admission	The degree is the university’s; complaints about teaching go to the college and the university, and about the award to the university
Any other institution: a private institute, a training company, a foreign provider acting without Indian statutory authority, a body calling itself a university	No. Section 22(2) bars it, and Section 23 bars it from using the word university	Certificates, diplomas and testimonials of its own, which are not degrees in law	Absence from the Commission’s list of universities and presence, in the worst cases, on its published list of fake universities is decisive	Treat the qualification as not a degree for admission or employment; pursue refund and remedies for misrepresentation, and report the institution to the Commission and the police

The table states the routing, and the surrounding text of this section states the law. Two habits of verification follow from the scheme and are worth more than any general warning. The first is to check the legal basis rather than the branding: an institution’s prospectus, building and placement record say nothing about its place in Section 22, and the Gazette notification of a deemed university declaration, the establishing Act of a university, and the Commission’s published lists are documents a student can actually read before paying a fee. Where those documents arrive as scans and attachments, as approval letters and notifications usually do, a reader can open the office documents in a browser-based viewer and read the operative page rather than the covering claim. The second habit is to check the programme as well as the institution: a lawful university can still offer a programme outside the specifications the Commission has notified, in a mode it was not approved for, or from premises outside the jurisdiction its status covers, and each of those defects has featured in litigation about qualifications that looked regular on their face. The general position described here is information about how the system is arranged and not advice on an individual case; anyone holding a qualification whose validity is contested should take advice on the specific facts, because the outcome usually turns on the institution’s status, and the programme’s approval, on the dates the course was actually pursued.

Why does the definition route work as regulation when the penalty does not? Because the consumers of degrees are not the institutions that award them but the universities that admit their holders and the employers that hire them, and those consumers can apply the definition at no cost to themselves by the simple act of refusal. A fake degree is not suppressed; it is refused currency. That is the mechanism the Act builds, and it is the same mechanism that makes the Commission’s specification of degree nomenclature under Section 22(3) a real power rather than a drafting tidiness: to control the list of names of degrees is to control the denominations of the currency. Reform proposals that promise to replace the Commission with a lighter regulator repeatedly discover this mechanism late, when drafting the chapter on what happens to degrees awarded by institutions the new regulator has closed, and it is at that point in the drafting that the tidy four-vertical architecture tends to acquire a fifth, unplanned function that looks very much like the Commission being abolished.

Who and what the Act binds

The Act’s reach is best understood by walking the classes of institution in the system and asking, of each, which provisions touch it. The university established by a Central or State Act is the Act’s central case: it is a university within Section 2(f), its degrees are degrees under Section 22, it may receive grants subject to Section 12B if it was established after the 1972 amendment, its teachers’ qualifications are governed by the regulations, and the Commission may inspect it, advise it and require information from it. The institution deemed to be a university under Section 3 stands in the same position by force of the declaration, which applies the whole Act to it as if it were a university, with the difference that its status is held by notification rather than by incorporation and can in principle be revisited by the process that granted it. The institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament holds its degree power from its own statute; the Commission’s functions reach it only partially and unevenly, and some of the most prominent institutions in the country, the institutes of technology and of management among them, live substantially outside the Commission’s regulatory field, a gap the Bill of 2025 was drafted in part to close.

The affiliated college is the Act’s largest subject and its least direct one. A college is not a university, cannot award a degree, and is governed in its affiliation by the university to which it is affiliated under that university’s Act and statutes. Yet the college is where most undergraduate teaching in India happens, and the Act reaches it obliquely but effectively: through the standards regulations that bind its university, through the qualifications regulations that govern the appointment of its teachers where the university applies them to affiliated institutions, through the fee provision of Section 12A, which is addressed to colleges by name, and through the grant clauses, under which development assistance for colleges has flowed through schemes framed by the Commission. The distance between the Act’s text and the college’s experience is filled by the affiliating university, which transmits, dilutes or occasionally defies the norms. This is why the quality debate in Indian higher education is so often a debate about affiliation: the statutory regulator of standards and the institution legally responsible for the college are different bodies, joined by a university in the middle that answers to a state government.

Two further classes mark the Act’s boundaries. The professional councils, the bodies governing medicine, law, architecture, pharmacy, nursing and other regulated professions, hold their own statutes and their own powers over the professional programmes that universities also teach, and the overlap between a council’s programme norms and the Commission’s standards regulations is a standing source of friction that the courts have had to mediate, most prominently where technical education is concerned. Teacher education has its own council and its own Act, linked earlier in this article as the parallel regulator of the cluster. And the open university and the distance learner sit inside the Act through the degree definition and the standards regulations for distance and online programmes, not through any separate charter: a degree earned at a distance is a degree if the awarding institution is within Section 22 and the programme was run within the regulations that govern that mode, and it is not otherwise, however substantial the study behind it.

The open universities illustrate the same architecture from the inside. The Indira Gandhi National Open University was established by its own Act of Parliament in 1985 and holds its degree power as a central university, not by any special dispensation in the UGC Act, and the state open universities hold theirs from their state Acts. What the Commission supplies to that sector is the standards framework for distance and online delivery and the specification of the degrees themselves, which is why the validity of a distance degree is a two-document question: the establishing Act of the awarding university, and the programme’s position under the regulations governing that mode. Students who ask only whether an open university is genuine are asking the first question and omitting the second, and the litigation record of distance education in India is largely the record of that omission.

One further class tests the definition from outside the country. A foreign university has no place in Section 22 as such: it is neither established under an Indian Act nor deemed under Section 3 nor specially empowered by Parliament, and a degree awarded in India by a foreign provider acting on its own authority is not an Indian degree within the Act. The system’s answers have been layered: collaborative and twinning arrangements routed through Indian universities, which award the degree; the requirement that foreign-linked programmes operate within the regulations the Commission frames for the purpose; and, in the regulations of 2023 for the setting up and operation of campuses of foreign higher educational institutions in India, a scheme under which highly ranked foreign institutions may establish campuses and award their own degrees under conditions the Commission prescribes. The episode confirms the structural point once more. Even the entry of foreign providers, a question of trade, diplomacy and educational ambition, had to be arranged inside the Act’s definition of a degree, because there is no other legal place in the Indian system where the question what counts as a degree is answered.

What the Act does not bind is as important to a pillar account. It does not touch school education, which is governed by state law and, for the elementary stage, by the central right-to-education statute linked in this article. It does not regulate professional practice: the right to practise medicine or law flows from the professional statutes, not from the possession of a degree alone, and the Commission has no enrolment or licensing function. It does not set the fees of institutions generally, the sleeping power of Section 12A aside. It does not conduct examinations, appoint teachers or vice chancellors, own land, or run a single classroom. Its entire empire is made of definitions, norms, information and money, and the measure of the Act is how far a system can be governed by those four instruments when the institutions themselves belong to other governments and other statutes.

The everyday machinery: lists, eligibility and common services

Between the Act’s grand provisions and the citizen’s experience of the system stands a body of everyday machinery that the Commission built under its general powers, and which most students and teachers encounter long before they hear of Section 12. The first piece is the list. The Commission maintains and publishes the list of universities within the meaning of Section 2(f), recording against each the position under Section 12B, and separate lists of institutions deemed to be universities, of colleges, and of institutions it designates as fake universities, those bodies which, in its assessment, confer degrees in defiance of the Act. The lists have no single section of the Act to call their own; they are the administrative deposit of the definition, the fitness gate and the information power, and they are the documents by which employers, universities and foreign credential evaluators in practice decide what an Indian qualification is. In litigation and in service matters, inclusion and exclusion have consequences that the spare text of Section 2(f) would never suggest.

The second piece is the eligibility machinery for the academic profession. Under the qualifications regulations the Commission conducts, through an agency it designates, the National Eligibility Test, which operates as the national qualifying examination for assistant professorship and for the award of junior research fellowships. The test is the point at which the regulation power becomes a personal gate in the life of every aspiring teacher: a candidate may hold a first-class degree from a university of standing and still stand outside the profession until the prescribed eligibility condition, the test or a doctorate earned under the prescribed regulations, is satisfied. The courts’ acceptance of that gate in the Raj Singh line of authority is what makes the machinery durable. Around the test the Commission runs the fellowship and research support schemes that the grant clauses sustain, and the career advancement framework of the qualifications regulations, under which promotion through the grades of the profession is tied to prescribed qualifications, service and academic performance measures.

Accreditation grew up beside the Act rather than inside it, and its position illuminates the system’s habits. The Commission established the National Assessment and Accreditation Council in 1994 as an autonomous institution to assess and accredit universities and colleges, and accreditation, which began as a voluntary quality exercise, hardened over time into a condition attached to grants, to graded autonomy and to public standing, so that a university’s accreditation grade became a fact with financial and regulatory consequences although no section of the Act provides for grading at all. The policy of 2020 proposes to regularise this position by giving accreditation its own vertical in the successor body, with accreditation as the gateway through which institutions earn autonomy in steps. The history matters because it shows how the system actually reforms itself when the statute is not amended: by building a body under a general power, attaching consequences to its outputs by regulation and practice, and leaving the legal theory to be tidied by a later generation. A successor statute that simply repeals the Act and lists the new body’s functions will inherit the accreditation question in exactly the untidy form in which the present system holds it.

The third piece is the common services built under clause (ccc) of Section 12 and the residuary function. The power to establish institutions providing common facilities for groups of universities produced the inter-university centres, the information and library network that gives university libraries shared access to electronic journals and bibliographic resources, the consortium arrangements for research infrastructure, and the academic staff development institutions through which university teachers are trained and refreshed. These bodies rarely feature in accounts of the Commission’s power, because their work is service rather than command, but they are the part of the Act’s legacy that universities would find hardest to replace from their own resources, and they complicate the abolition argument in a practical way: a successor regulator designed as a lean standards body has no obvious home for a library network, a set of research centres and a national eligibility test, and each draft successor has had to find corners for functions its architecture was not designed to hold.

The deemed university route: Section 3 and its consequences

Section 3 is nine lines long and has caused more litigation, more committee work and more ministerial embarrassment than any other provision of the Act. It provides that the Central Government may, on the advice of the Commission, declare by notification in the Official Gazette that any institution for higher education other than a university shall be deemed to be a university for the purposes of the Act, whereupon all the provisions of the Act apply to the institution as if it were a university within the meaning of Section 2(f). The device is a legal fiction with a serious purpose. A small number of institutions of genuine distinction, research institutes and specialised academies that were not universities in form, needed the degree power and the place in the university system that only the Act could give them, and Section 3 let the system admit them without the apparatus of a incorporating statute for each.

The route’s history divides into a long respectable phase and a short disgraceful one. For decades the declarations were few and defensible, granted to institutions with established academic records. The disgrace arrived with scale: as the demand for degree-granting status grew and the alternative routes, a state private university Act or a central institution statute, proved slower or politically harder, the deemed route became the path of least resistance, and declarations multiplied in favour of institutions promoted by trusts and companies whose assets were land and political access rather than scholarship. Because a declaration is made by the Central Government on the Commission’s advice, the episode also damaged the Commission, which had advised, or had failed to resist advising, in cases that could not survive inspection. The deemed university is therefore the point in the Act where the structural weakness of ex post control and the appointment-dependence of the advising body met the commercial value of the degree monopoly, and the product was a scandal with a statute number.

The reckoning came through a committee. In 2009 the Ministry of Human Resource Development constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Professor P. N. Tandon to review the functioning of institutions deemed to be universities. The committee examined 126 institutions and reported in October 2009, sorting them into three categories: 38 institutions it found fit to continue with deemed status, 44 it found deficient in some respects but capable of remedy within a period of three years, and 44 of which it recorded the conclusion that they neither on past performance nor on their promise for the future had the attributes to retain the status of universities. The government accepted the report and moved to withdraw the status of the 44 in the lowest category, and there the administrative process collided with the courts. The affected institutions challenged the withdrawal, and the Supreme Court directed that the status quo be maintained while the challenge was heard. In January 2014 the Court closed that phase of the matter by directing the Commission itself to decide the status of the 44 institutions afresh, in accordance with law, after notice to them, and the Court recorded that it had given its stamp of approval to none of the reports before it. The institutional meaning of that outcome is the part worth retaining: the power to unmake a deemed university was returned to the statutory regulator to be exercised through its own process, and the ministry’s attempt to act on a committee’s classification, in a field the Act commits to the Commission’s advice and process, did not survive judicial scrutiny.

The aftermath was regulatory consolidation rather than mass withdrawal. Declarations since the review have been slower and more conditioned, the Commission’s regulations for institutions deemed to be universities were recast, most comprehensively in the regulations of 2023, which tightened eligibility, governance and review conditions and dealt expressly with the circumstances in which a declaration may be withdrawn, and the political system absorbed the lesson that the deemed route is watched. The deeper lesson of the episode is about the Act’s design. Section 3 gives the declaration power to the government and only the advisory role to the Commission, and it states no criteria on its face; every criterion that disciplines the power lives in regulations and guidelines made under the Act. A power to create degree-granting institutions by notification, exercised on advice, with its standards in subordinate legislation, is a power whose integrity depends entirely on the integrity of the advisory process, and the Tandon review is the record of what the system does when that process is found wanting: it appoints a committee, litigates for years, and hands the question back to the regulator.

The episode also left a deposit in the case law and the regulations that outlasted the headlines. Institutions that had admitted students and awarded degrees in good faith on the strength of a declaration could not have those degrees retrospectively destroyed without the system injuring the innocent party to the transaction, the student, and the courts’ management of the review consistently protected enrolled students while the status question was decided. The regulations of 2023 for institutions deemed to be universities absorbed the review’s criteria into standing law: eligibility thresholds for applicant institutions, governance conditions directed at the family-controlled trust structures the Tandon Committee had criticised, continuing review against prescribed parameters, and an express scheme for withdrawal of the declaration where the conditions fail, with the protection of students on the rolls as a stated object of the withdrawal process. Read against Section 3’s nine spare lines, the regulations of 2023 are the true statute of deemed universities, and they illustrate the Act’s characteristic distribution of labour, in which Parliament supplies a power in a sentence and the regulator supplies the law in a code.

Rules and regulations: the subordinate legislation engine

The Act’s last operative provisions divide the subordinate legislation between two makers, and the division is a small lesson in Indian public law. Section 25 gives the rule-making power to the Central Government: rules may provide for the retirement procedure and disqualifications of members, the terms and conditions of service of members and of the Commission’s employees, the additional functions the Commission may perform under clause (j) of Section 12, the returns and information to be furnished by universities, the inspection of universities, the form of the Commission’s budget and reports, the manner of keeping its accounts, and any other matter to be prescribed. Section 26 gives the regulation-making power to the Commission itself, by regulations consistent with the Act and the rules, on the subjects that constitute the academic core of the system: the Commission’s own meetings and the association of outside persons, the service conditions of its employees, the specification of institutions that may be recognised under the definition in Section 2(f), the qualifications that should ordinarily be required of persons appointed to the teaching staff of a university, the minimum standards of instruction for the grant of any degree, and the maintenance of standards and the coordination of work and facilities in universities. The 1984 amendment added regulations on the common-facility institutions, on the fee matters and inquiry procedure under Section 12A, required the previous approval of the Central Government for regulations on the housekeeping and fee subjects while leaving the academic subjects to the Commission, and conferred the limited power of retrospective effect described earlier. Section 28 requires rules and regulations to be laid before Parliament.

What is the difference between rules and regulations under the UGC Act?

Rules are made by the Central Government under Section 25 and govern the Commission itself: membership, service conditions, inspections, budgets and accounts. Regulations are made by the Commission under Section 26 and govern universities: qualifications of teachers, minimum standards of instruction for degrees and the maintenance of standards.

The regulations are where the Commission’s power becomes concrete in the life of every university, and a pillar account of the Act has to describe the main families. The qualifications regulations, made under clause (e) of Section 26(1), prescribe the minimum qualifications for appointment and promotion of teachers and academic staff: the regulations of 2010 and their successors of 2018 built the framework under which a master’s degree with the prescribed marks, the National Eligibility Test or a doctorate under the prescribed conditions, and specified experience govern entry to and movement within the academic profession, and the same regulations prescribe the composition of selection committees and, fatefully for the federalism dispute, the composition of the search committee for the appointment of vice chancellors. The standards regulations under clauses (f) and (g) specify minimum standards of instruction for the grant of degrees and regulate the maintenance of standards: under these heads sit the regulations on the specification of degrees, on minimum standards for distance and online programmes, recast in the regulations of 2020 for open and distance learning and online learning, on the award of degrees through credit frameworks, and on the institutions deemed to be universities themselves. The curriculum frameworks the Commission issues translate the standards power into subject-level expectations. None of this material is in the Act. All of it is law, made by a body of twelve appointees under a power Parliament granted in general words in 1956, laid before Parliament under Section 28, and enforceable, as the next sections show, against universities created by state legislatures that never voted for it.

That is the sense in which the brief for this article calls the regulation-making power one of the two provisions that give the Commission real power. The grant power reaches universities that take the Commission’s money. The regulation power reaches every university within the Act, aided or unaided, central or state, because it attaches to the things that make a university a university: who may teach in it, what its degrees require, and how its head is chosen. A state government that resents a regulation cannot repeal it, cannot legislate it away within the field of standards, and cannot instruct its universities to disregard it, as the courts have held in the line of cases taken up below after dealing with the Act’s strangest sleeping power, the fee provision.

Standards in practice: nomenclature, credit and modes of learning

Three applications of the standards power show its range better than any abstract description. The first is nomenclature. Section 22(3) reserves the specification of degrees to the Commission with the approval of the Central Government, and the Commission’s specification, published by notification, lists the degrees that may be awarded and the abbreviations by which they are known. The practical effect reaches into every admission office and personnel department in the country: an institution that invents an attractive degree title, or revives an obsolete one, or awards a nomenclature reserved for a different level of study, is not exercising academic freedom but breaching the specification, and the qualification its students carry is exposed at every point where it is presented. The specification power is the denomination control of the degree currency described earlier, and it is exercised continuously and without controversy, which is what successful regulation looks like.

The second application is structure. Under the standards clauses of Section 26 the Commission has framed the architecture within which degrees are earned: the choice-based credit system frameworks, the curriculum frameworks for subjects, the regulations on the award of degrees and certificates through accumulated credit, and the regulations of 2021 that established the Academic Bank of Credits, a mechanism under which credits earned by a student at recognised institutions are deposited, transferred and redeemed toward a qualification across institutions. The credit instruments matter to the reading of the Act because they show the standards power being used for mobility rather than for control: the object is to let a student’s learning travel between institutions without losing its value, which is possible at all only because a single specification and standards authority underwrites the units in which the learning is measured. A fragmented system of regulators, each sovereign over its own institutions, would have to negotiate that underwriting between themselves, and the history of credit transfer between Indian institutions before a central framework existed is the record of how rarely such negotiation succeeds.

The third application is mode. The regulations governing open and distance learning and online programmes, recast in 2020, determine which institutions may offer programmes at a distance or online, on what conditions, and with what territorial and programme-level approvals, and they are the provisions by which the validity of a very large number of degrees earned outside a classroom is decided. The recurring errors in this field are institutional rather than individual: a university entitled to offer distance programmes within its jurisdiction offers them beyond it, a programme is run in a subject or at a level the entitlement does not cover, or a study centre is treated as a campus. Each error has the same legal structure, a degree awarded outside the conditions on which the awarding power was held, and each has generated the same painful litigation, in which the party least responsible for the defect, the student, bears its cost. The lesson the mode regulations teach about the Act as a whole is that the Commission’s standards power is at its most valuable when it is most specific, because specificity about entitlement is what converts a general monopoly into a checkable public fact, and it is at its weakest when it operates through after-the-fact assessment of institutions that have already enrolled their students and spent their fees.

The fee power that sleeps: Section 12A

Section 12A, inserted by the Amendment Act of 1984 with effect from 1 October 1984, bears the heading “Regulation of fees and prohibition of donations in certain cases”, and it is the most instructive unused power in the Act. Its scheme is exact. If the Commission, having regard to the nature of a course of study for obtaining a qualification, the activities its holders are likely to engage in, the minimum standards they should maintain, and the need to ensure that no candidate secures admission by reason of economic power and thereby prevents a more meritorious candidate from securing admission, is satisfied that it is necessary in the public interest to do so, it may, after consultation with the universities concerned, specify by regulations the matters in respect of which fees may be charged and the scale of fees for those matters by any college providing that course of study, with power to differentiate between universities, classes of colleges and areas. Where such regulations are made for a course, no college providing it may charge fees for any other matter, or above the specified scale, or accept any payment other than fees, or any donation or gift in cash or kind, from or in relation to a student in connection with admission to or prosecution of the course. Breach is met by an inquiry and, with the previous approval of the Central Government, an order prohibiting the college from presenting its students to any university for the award of the qualification, whereupon the college’s affiliation for that course stands terminated and may not be granted again by any university for three years, the Commission being charged with safeguarding the interests of the students concerned. Sub-section (7) gives the section and its regulations overriding effect notwithstanding anything inconsistent in any other law.

The provision is, on paper, a complete anti-capitation code with a sanction that strikes at the college’s degree pipeline, which is the one thing a college cannot survive losing. Its history in practice is the opposite of its drafting. Fee regulation of professional education in India was built elsewhere: by state legislation and fee committees, and by the constitutional case law on unaided institutions, in which the Supreme Court, in P. A. Inamdar v. State of Maharashtra in 2005, held the imposition of capitation fee to be impermissible while leaving the fee of unaided professional institutions to be fixed through committees that test the fee against profiteering rather than cap it in the abstract. The Commission’s power under Section 12A is framed for colleges providing courses of study and operates through the affiliation sanction, and it has not been the instrument by which the system’s fees were in fact governed; its most durable use is as a prohibition of donations in the deemed university and college context through the regulations and norms that cite it, and as a statement of the principle that admission bought with money is a standards violation and not merely a pricing choice. The honest pillar verdict on Section 12A is that Parliament in 1984 gave the Commission a sword the Commission has largely kept sheathed, partly from prudence about the federal and constitutional litigation a general fee scale would attract, and partly because the provision’s trigger, a course-by-course satisfaction recorded after consultation, is cumbersome by design. The provision matters to the argument of this article because it completes the map of the Commission’s powers: the money power, the information power, the inspection power, the fee power, the regulation power and the degree definition. Of those six, the two that bite without the Commission having to spend or persuade are the last two, and they are both exercises in definition.

Two connected practices complete the picture of the standards power at work. The first is equivalence. Because the Act makes a degree a creature of statute, the value of qualifications from outside the statutory classes, foreign degrees above all, has to be determined by somebody, and in practice the equivalence of foreign qualifications for admission and employment is assessed through the Association of Indian Universities, an inter-university body that is not a creature of the Act at all, working alongside the Commission’s specification of Indian degrees. The seam shows the system’s pragmatism and its untidiness at once: the legal definition is the Commission’s, while the passport office for foreign paper is a voluntary association of the universities themselves. The second practice is admission testing. The Commission does not conduct university examinations, and nothing in the Act authorises it to set a paper for a single student. Yet the standards duty has supported, in the policy period opened by the National Education Policy, the Common University Entrance Test conducted by the National Testing Agency from 2022 for admissions to the central universities, on the reasoning that a common entrance standard is an instrument for the determination of standards of teaching by governing the preparation and comparability of the intake. Whether entrance testing is a standards measure or an admissions measure is a genuine question about the reach of Section 12, and it is characteristic of the Act’s late life that the question is being worked out in administration rather than in litigation.

Research, doctorates and the standards of scholarship

The general duty in Section 12 names research alongside teaching and examination, and the third object has generated its own body of subordinate law. The Commission’s regulations on the minimum standards and procedure for the award of the doctorate, recast in the regulations of 2022, prescribe the conditions under which a university may admit research scholars, constitute research advisory structures, require coursework and evaluation, and award the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, and they were framed against a documented pathology: the multiplication of doctorates of little substance by universities that treated the research degree as a product line, with consequences for the credibility of the qualification the Act exists to protect. Beside the doctoral regulations stand the fellowship and scholarship schemes run out of the grant clauses, the research support for teachers, and the academic integrity regulations, which address plagiarism and prescribe the graded consequences of unattributed copying in theses and publications. The research provisions are a useful corrective to the caricature of the Commission as a body concerned only with undergraduate teaching loads and building grants. They also display the standards power in its most defensible use: the value of a doctorate, like the value of a first degree, is a network fact that no single university can sustain for itself, because a doctorate is presented to other institutions for employment, and a doctorate debased at its source debases the appointments market everywhere. A national floor under the research degree is the kind of standard that only a body in the Commission’s position can set, and the case for its existence is at its strongest exactly here, in the field where the regulated institutions are least able to supply the good for themselves.

The enforcement architecture read as a whole

A reader who assembles the Act’s sanctions in one place sees a deliberate-looking gradient that is, in truth, an accident of drafting across three decades. At the bottom stands the criminal penalty of Section 24, a fine of up to one thousand rupees for contravening the degree monopoly or the prohibition on the word university, a penalty fixed in 1956 and never revised. Above it stands publicity: the Commission’s power to name an institution on its published list of fake universities, which is not conferred by any section in terms but is exercised under the information function and has more effect on enrolments than any prosecution under Section 24 has ever had. Above publicity stands the money: the Section 12B gate, which keeps central grants from a new university the Commission has not declared fit, and the Section 14 power to withhold grants from a university that ignores recommendations, each confined to funds within the Commission’s gift. Above the money stands the one sanction with institutional killing power, the order under Section 12A by which a college that takes prohibited donations loses the right to present students for the qualification and loses its affiliation for the course for three years; it is aimed at colleges, gated by the previous approval of the Central Government, and tied to the fee and donation field alone. And across the whole structure stands the enforcement that is not a sanction at all: the refusal of the downstream system to treat an out-of-class qualification as a degree, which is automatic, costless to apply and impossible to appeal.

The gaps in the gradient explain the recurring complaint that the Act cannot punish. There is no graduated penalty for a university that breaches the standards regulations, no power to suspend admissions, no power to fine an institution a sum proportioned to its turnover, and no power to direct the closure of a university or a deemed institution otherwise than through the processes governing the declaration or the establishing Act, which belong to governments. Where the system’s misconduct is that of a university rather than a fake institution, the Commission’s instruments reduce, in the last analysis, to withholding development grants, publishing findings, and relying on the courts to enforce its regulations at the suit of affected parties, which is why so much of the Act’s real enforcement history is written in writ petitions filed by teachers, students and rival institutions rather than in orders of the Commission. The Bill of 2025 was drafted against exactly this audit: its graded penalties, running from ten lakh rupees to two crore rupees, its powers directed at institutions established without approval, and its removal of the funding function from the regulator are all responses to gaps named in this paragraph, and the joint committee’s insistence that penalties be tied to proven violations and not imposed arbitrarily is the counterweight the audit equally requires. The enforcement debate is therefore not between enforcement and its absence. It is between enforcement by definition, which the Act of 1956 achieves and which falls hardest on students holding worthless paper, and enforcement by penalty, which the Bill proposes and which falls on institutions; a mature statute would have both, calibrated so that the penalty reaches the promoter of a worthless institution before the definition reaches the student who bought its degree.

The courts and the boundary of the standards power

The judicial treatment of the Act is the subject of a specialist article in this cluster, and the pillar confines itself to the holdings that fix the Act’s meaning in practice, stated at the level of the propositions the courts established.

The oldest line concerns academic judgment. In University of Mysore v. C. D. Govinda Rao in 1964, the Supreme Court treated the recommendations of expert bodies on the qualifications of a candidate for a university post with pronounced respect, holding in substance that courts, which are not equipped to decide academic questions, should be slow to interfere with the assessment of the bodies the system charges with making it. The proposition set the tone for the appointment jurisprudence under the Act: the Commission and the selection bodies it regulates operate in a field where courts police legality, fairness and conformity with the governing regulations, and decline to re-mark the academic merits.

A connected holding concerns the eligibility test. In University of Delhi v. Raj Singh in 1994, the Supreme Court upheld the Commission’s prescription, by regulation, of the National Eligibility Test as a qualifying condition for appointment as a lecturer, against the argument that the prescription trenched on the universities’ own power to choose their teachers. The decision fixed the character of the qualifications regulations early: they are a permissible exercise of the standards power, they bind universities in recruitment, and the university’s autonomy in selection operates in the choice among candidates who meet the prescribed floor, not in a liberty to appoint below it.

The second line concerns the reach of central standards norms against state enactments. In State of Tamil Nadu v. Adhiyaman Educational and Research Institute in 1995, decided under the technical education council’s statute, the Supreme Court held that where Parliament has legislated for standards in higher and technical education under Entry 66, the norms laid down by the central body prevail, and a state law or university statute that dilutes those norms cannot stand against them. The reasoning is the reasoning of Entry 66 itself: the Union’s power to determine standards would be defeated if each state could set the standard lower for its own institutions, and the judgment supplied the doctrinal bridge by which the Commission’s regulations, made under a statute traceable to the same entry, are read as prevailing law in the field of standards.

The third line concerns the integrity of the university form. In Prof. Yash Pal v. State of Chhattisgarh in 2005, the Supreme Court struck down provisions of a Chhattisgarh statute under which private universities could be created in numbers by notification, holding in substance that a university is not a label a government can distribute but an institution that must actually possess the character of a university, with the infrastructure and academic substance the name promises. The case is the judicial twin of the deemed university problem: both are attempts to manufacture degree-granting institutions by executive or legislative shortcut, and the Court’s insistence that the form carries substantive conditions is the closest the case law comes to supplying the ex ante control the UGC Act itself does not contain.

The fourth and most contested line concerns appointments, and it is the professor and vice chancellor line the brief for this article assigns to this pillar. In Kalyani Mathivanan v. K. V. Jeyaraj in 2015, the Supreme Court held that the Commission’s regulations on minimum qualifications, including the regulation prescribing how the search committee for a vice chancellor is to be composed, are binding on state universities, that they partake of the character of law under the standards entry, and that an appointment of a vice chancellor made through a process that did not conform to the regulations could not be sustained. The Court returned to the same ground in Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi v. State of Gujarat in 2019, setting aside an appointment where the search process departed from the regulations, and again in Professor (Dr) Sreejith P. S. v. Dr Rajasree M. S. in 2022, where a vice chancellor’s appointment fell because the search committee had been constituted by the Chancellor alone and had recommended a single name, contrary to the scheme of the regulations of 2018. The cumulative proposition of the appointment cases is precise, and it is the proposition on which the present federalism dispute turns: the Commission may, by regulation, prescribe the qualifications for academic posts and the procedure by which the head of a university is selected, and a state university Act or a state government’s preference must yield where the two conflict, because selection standards for the highest academic office are treated as part of the determination of standards and not as part of the state’s administrative domain.

Critics of that line, including state governments that have resisted it in litigation and in politics, make a serious argument that should be stated at strength here and is analysed in full in the federalism article of this series: the appointment of a vice chancellor is the constitutive act of a university’s self-government, the states create and fund most universities, and a construction of standards that reaches the identity of the person who heads the institution has travelled a long way from the coordination of teaching and examination standards that Entry 66 names. The courts have acknowledged the federal structure while holding the line at standards, and the boundary they have produced is genuinely contestable at its edge, which is why the edge keeps being litigated. What is not contestable is the doctrinal position: the regulations bind, the appointment cases are Supreme Court authority, and a state that wishes to appoint its vice chancellors by its own method must either secure a change in the regulations or a change in the law.

The Commission and the states in daily practice

The federalism of the Act is usually discussed at the level of doctrine, but it is lived at the level of routine. A state that establishes a public university drafts its Act against the background of the regulations, knowing that the qualifications of the university’s teachers, the specification of its degrees and the composition of the committee that will choose its vice chancellor are already prescribed from the centre, and that the new university’s access to central money waits on the Commission’s declaration of fitness. A state that legislates for private universities legislates into a field the Commission has also entered, through its regulations of 2003 on the establishment of and maintenance of standards in private universities, under which new private universities are visited, reported on and required to conform to prescribed norms as a condition of their place in the recognised system. When the Union launched the Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan in 2013, a centrally sponsored programme of support to state higher education, it worked through state higher education councils and state plans, an acknowledgement in programme design that the state system cannot be developed from the centre by regulation alone. The texture of the relationship is therefore neither subordination nor separation. It is a continuous negotiation conducted through drafts, visits, declarations and litigation, in which the Commission holds the norms and the money at the margin, and the states hold the institutions, the payrolls and the politics.

Two features of that negotiation deserve record in a pillar article. The first is the asymmetry of information. The Commission’s information power under clause (i) of Section 12, and the returns prescribed under the rules, make it the one body that sees the whole system, and its published statistics and lists are the common factual ground on which state governments, courts and Parliament argue. The All India Survey on Higher Education, conducted by the education ministry rather than by the Commission, supplies the enrolment and institution counts used in this article, and the two information systems together are the reason the Indian debate about higher education, however heated, is usually a debate about shared facts. The second feature is the role of the Governor as Chancellor, the constitutional hinge on which the appointment disputes turn. In most state university Acts the Governor is Chancellor and appoints the vice chancellor, acting in that capacity on a process the Act and regulations frame; the office therefore sits at the junction of the Union’s standards power, the state’s university and the Governor’s dual character, and every defect in the design of the search process is amplified by the suspicion, on one side, that the Chancellor is the Centre’s instrument, and on the other, that the state government seeks a compliant incumbent. The draft regulations of 2025 detonated on exactly this hinge, as the section devoted to them records.

The Commission among regulators: a comparison of techniques

The Commission’s design is thrown into relief by the regulators beside it, because Indian education law has tried, within one generation, almost every technique of regulation the state knows. The technical education council works by entry control: an institution that wishes to run an approved technical programme requires the council’s approval before it begins, and the council’s norms operate as conditions of a licence. The teacher education council works by recognition of institutions for specified courses, with withdrawal of recognition as its working sanction. The medical and legal regulators combine education with the licence to practise, so that their educational norms are enforced by the student’s need to be enrolled at the end of the course. The Commission, alone among the major regulators, works without a licence at its centre. It cannot approve or refuse the birth of a university, it does not license programmes, and it does not control any profession’s door. Its technique is to define the product, a degree, to specify the conditions of the institutions that may supply it, and to let the consumers of the product enforce the definition by refusing anything that falls outside it.

Each technique has its characteristic failure. Entry control fails by bottleneck and by rent, because a licence that must be obtained before anything can happen concentrates discretion at the point of maximum commercial pressure. Recognition systems fail by drift, because withdrawal is so destructive to enrolled students that it is threatened often and executed rarely. Practice-linked regulation fails by capture of the educational norm by the profession’s interest in restricting entry. Definition-based regulation fails in the opposite direction: it is cheap to run and hard to capture, because there is no licence to sell, but it cannot improve an institution that is inside the definition and bad, and it protects the student only at the moment of refusal, after the fees are spent. The Commission’s history exhibits its technique’s failures faithfully, including the list of recognised institutions whose quality no one defends. The reform proposals surveyed in the next section can each be read as an attempt to graft one of the other techniques onto the Commission’s definition: the draft of 2018 reached for enforcement and closure powers, the policy of 2020 for an accreditation vertical that would make quality gradation public and consequential, and the Bill of 2025 for penalties and approval offences. None of the proposals abandons the definition, because none can. That is the strongest available evidence for this article’s claim about where the power in the Act resides.

The abolition record: committees, a withdrawn bill, a draft and a policy

The case against the Commission’s design is not a partisan case. It has been made, in substantially the same terms, by the state’s own expert bodies across two decades and two governments, and a pillar article that did not set it out at strength would fail its subject. The indictment has three counts. The first is the conflict of roles: a body that both funds universities and regulates them will soften its regulation of the institutions it funds, will be judged by the money it distributes rather than the standards it keeps, and will confuse the universities, which cannot tell whether a visit is an audit or an appraisal. The second is the character of the regulation: input-based and micro-managerial, prescribing the physical and staffing conditions of teaching in detail while measuring outcomes weakly, so that compliance displaces quality as the system’s working objective. The third is the deemed university and affiliation record: a standards body that presided over the multiplication of degree-granting institutions of variable quality, inside an affiliating structure it never reformed, cannot claim that the present architecture is merely under-resourced.

The National Knowledge Commission, chaired by Sam Pitroda, made the replacement argument in the middle of the first decade of the century, recommending an Independent Regulatory Authority for Higher Education that would take over the entry and regulatory functions then scattered among the Commission and the professional councils, which would be confined to the role of professional associations. The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education, chaired by Professor Yash Pal, carried the argument to its conclusion in its report of 24 June 2009: an all-encompassing National Commission for Higher Education and Research, conceived as a constitutional body, should replace the existing regulatory bodies including the Commission, the technical education council, the teacher education council and the distance education council, and should absorb the academic functions of the professional councils, freeing universities to be responsible for the academic content of all their courses. A bill drawn on that template, the Higher Education and Research Bill, was introduced in the Rajya Sabha in 2011 and was later withdrawn without enactment, after parliamentary scrutiny had exposed the federal difficulty at the heart of every version of the proposal: a single national regulator with power over state universities legislates directly against the grain of a Constitution that gives the states the universities and the Union only their standards.

The second attempt changed the design rather than the destination. On 27 June 2018 the Ministry of Human Resource Development published the draft Higher Education Commission of India (Repeal of University Grants Commission Act) Bill, 2018, announced by the minister, Prakash Javadekar, and opened it for public comment; the ministry recorded 9,926 suggestions on the draft. The draft would have repealed the Act of 1956 and created a Higher Education Commission of India with the regulatory and academic functions of the Commission but without its grant functions, which were to move to the ministry itself: the stated principles were less government and more governance, separation of grant functions, the end of the inspection raj in favour of public disclosure, and a focus on academic quality backed by powers of enforcement and closure. The draft was never introduced in Parliament. The objections that stopped it are instructive, because they were not objections to the diagnosis. Teacher organisations and academics objected that removing the grant function to the ministry did not separate funding from regulation but handed funding to the government directly, that the proposed commission’s composition weakened the place of serving academics, and that enforcement powers including closure were granted without an answering structure of institutional autonomy. The draft answered the conflict-of-roles count of the indictment by abolishing the funder, and discovered that the funder’s independence, however compromised, had itself been part of the settlement of 1956.

The diagnosis kept accumulating sponsors. The committee appointed to evolve the new education policy under the chairmanship of T. S. R. Subramanian reported in 2016 with recommendations for restructuring the regulatory framework of higher education, and the drafting committee for a new national policy, chaired by Dr K. Kasturirangan, carried the single-regulator proposal into the draft policy of 2019 in the form of a national higher education regulatory authority. By the time the policy was adopted, the proposition that the Commission should be replaced by a differently designed body had been endorsed, in one form or another, by a knowledge commission, a renovation committee, a policy evolution committee and a policy drafting committee, a sequence of expert agreement without parallel in Indian institutional reform and without, so far, a legislative result.

The National Education Policy, adopted on 29 July 2020, restated the destination in its most elaborated form. The policy proposes a single umbrella body, the Higher Education Commission of India, working through four separate verticals: a National Higher Education Regulatory Council for regulation, a National Accreditation Council for accreditation, a Higher Education Grants Council for funding, and a General Education Council for the framing of academic standards and learning outcomes, with professional education to be brought within the same architecture over time and medical and legal education kept outside it. The policy is a policy. It repeals nothing, creates nothing and binds no one, and every element of its regulatory design requires an Act of Parliament that replaces the Act of 1956 and the statutes of the other regulators. For the five years after the policy’s adoption, that Act did not arrive, and the Commission continued to govern under the statute of 1956 while the policy’s architecture circulated as the standing description of a reform that had been decided in principle and not in law.

The fourth attempt is the one that has travelled furthest through the legislative process, and it must be described with the precision the record supports and no further. The Union Cabinet approved the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 on 12 December 2025, and the Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha by the Union Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, on 15 December 2025. The Bill proposes to constitute a single apex commission for higher education, working through three councils for regulation, accreditation and standards, which would replace the Commission, the technical education council and the teacher education council, with the grant-making function placed outside the new body in the administrative ministry, with penalties for contravention running from ten lakh rupees to two crore rupees in place of the one thousand rupees of Section 24, and with coverage extending to the institutions of national importance that stand outside the Commission’s remit under the present law. On 16 December 2025 the Lok Sabha resolved to refer the Bill to a Joint Committee of both Houses, of twenty-one members from the Lok Sabha and ten from the Rajya Sabha. The committee’s draft report, circulated to its members in July 2026, recorded the apprehension that concentration of extensive regulatory powers in a single central regulator could lead to bureaucratic or ideological overreach and could affect the autonomy of higher education institutions, and it insisted that the graded penalties the Bill proposes cannot be imposed arbitrarily but must be linked to proven violations. On 6 August 2026 the Lok Sabha approved an extension of the committee’s time, granting it until the last week of the Winter Session of 2026 to complete its work. That is where the record stands: a bill introduced, examined by a joint committee, criticised within that committee for the concentration it would create, and not enacted; a policy adopted in 2020 whose central legislative promise awaits a statute; and, governing throughout, the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, in force and amended, under which the Commission continues to make regulations, declare fitness for grants and specify degrees. Any account that describes the Higher Education Commission of India as established, or the Commission as replaced, is describing the destination of a process and not its position.

The draft regulations of 2025 and the federalism flashpoint

While Parliament considered whether the Commission should continue to exist, the Commission used its regulation power to reopen the oldest fight in its history, and the episode belongs in a pillar article because it shows the regulation power working at its maximum reach. On 6 January 2025 the Commission released for public consultation the draft University Grants Commission (Minimum Qualifications for Appointment and Promotion of Teachers and Academic Staff in Universities and Colleges and Measures for the Maintenance of Standards in Higher Education) Regulations, 2025, intended to replace the regulations of 2018, and the Union Minister of Education presented the draft as a reform of flexibility and inclusion in academic appointments. Two features drew the fire. The draft widened eligibility for appointment as vice chancellor beyond the professorial route, admitting persons with at least ten years of senior-level experience in industry, public policy, public administration or public sector undertakings, provided they carried a demonstrable record of academic or scholarly contribution. And it reconstituted the search-cum-selection committee for vice chancellors as a three-member body constituted by the Chancellor or Visitor of the university, composed of the Chancellor’s nominee as chairperson, a nominee of the Chairman of the Commission and a nominee of the university’s apex body, a design in which the state government, as distinct from the Chancellor who is usually the state Governor, has no nominee.

The opposition was immediate, organised and federal in form. The Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly passed a resolution condemning the draft regulations and urging their withdrawal, with the Chief Minister, M. K. Stalin, describing them as an attack on the autonomy of state universities. The Chief Minister of Kerala, Pinarayi Vijayan, attacked the draft for enlarging the powers of Chancellors at the expense of the states. On 5 February 2025 the governments of Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana, meeting in conclave at Bengaluru, adopted a fifteen-point resolution rejecting the draft regulations and demanding their withdrawal, arguing that the states create, fund and are answerable for their universities, that education in the Concurrent List is a shared field and not a central one, and that a selection process for the head of a state university from which the state’s elected government is excluded is a centralisation effected by subordinate legislation without a parliamentary vote on the point. The Commission’s response defended the draft on the ground of transparency and clarity, arguing that the regulations of 2018 had left the composition of selection committees vague and that widening vice chancellor eligibility beyond a single career track followed practice elsewhere in the world. The consultation period for feedback was extended to 28 February 2025. The draft regulations were not notified as final regulations in that process, and the regulations of 2018 remained the operative instrument: the episode therefore stands, in strict procedural terms, as a proposal made, resisted by six state governments in concert, defended by the regulator, and left unperfected, while the appointments it concerned continued to be governed by the earlier regulations and by the case law built on them.

The episode is the live form of the boundary question the courts have been answering since Adhiyaman. The states’ strongest point is procedural and it is a good one: the composition of the committee that chooses the head of a state university is a matter on which reasonable federal systems differ, and to settle it by regulation, under a general standards power granted in 1956, is to make a constitutional choice without a legislature voting on that choice. The Commission’s strongest point is the one the Supreme Court has already accepted in the appointment cases: the qualifications and selection standards of the academic head are part of the determination of standards, uniformity in them is the point of Entry 66, and the states’ own record in vice chancellor appointments, which includes appointments annulled by the courts for disregard of the regulations and selections that collapsed into contests between Governors and governments, does not establish that the state process is a reliable guardian of academic standards. The analysis of where that dispute belongs in the constitutional scheme is owned, in this series, by the federalism article linked earlier; the pillar records the dispute because no account of the Act’s working life is honest without it.

Three errors the public record keeps making

A pillar article earns its place partly by correcting the errors that circulate most widely about its statute, and three errors about this Act recur so reliably that each deserves a direct answer. The first is that the Higher Education Commission of India exists. It does not. It has existed as a committee recommendation, as an unpublished destination in a withdrawn bill’s lineage, as a draft bill circulated for comment in 2018, and as a policy design since 2020; the operative successor proposal is the Bill of 2025, which stands referred to a joint committee and has not been enacted. Pages that describe the Commission as replaced, or that attribute powers to the proposed body in the present tense, are reporting an intention as a fact, and students who repeat the claim in examinations and interviews are marked down for it by examiners who know the legislative position.

The second error is that all regulations of the Commission bind all universities without qualification. The accurate position has edges. The regulations bind within the field of the standards power from which they derive, and within that field they prevail over inconsistent state law, as the appointment cases establish. They do not constitute a general power in the Commission to govern universities: a regulation must trace to a clause of Section 26 and be consistent with the Act and the rules, regulations on the subjects listed in Section 26(2) require the previous approval of the Central Government, and the Commission’s own housekeeping regulations govern the Commission rather than the universities. Universities have, on occasion, successfully resisted particular requirements as beyond the regulation power or as applied without the consultation the Act requires, and the standards field itself has the boundary the courts have drawn, between standards at the centre and establishment and administration in the states. The sentence that the regulations bind state universities is true. The sentence that they bind them in everything is not, and the difference is where most of the real disputes live.

The third error is the confusion of recognition with degree-granting authority, the most consequential of the three because it is the one on which students spend money. Recognition, in the working language of the system, is the Commission’s acknowledgement that an institution stands inside the regulated field for a stated purpose: inclusion in the lists, fitness for grants, approval of a programme or a mode of delivery. Degree-granting authority is a distinct and prior thing, conferred only by the three routes in Section 22(1). An institution may be recognised for one purpose and hold no degree power at all, as every affiliated college demonstrates; an institution may hold degree power and yet run a programme outside its recognition, which is the distance education defect; and an institution may display certificates of accreditation, membership, association and approval from bodies of every description and still stand outside Section 22 entirely, which is the anatomy of the fake university. The question to ask of any institution is therefore never whether it is approved, in the abstract, but two questions in sequence: under which route of Section 22 does it claim the power to award the degree, and is the particular programme, in the particular mode and place, within the recognition that covers it. An institution that can answer both questions with documents is inside the system. An institution that answers with adjectives is not.

Assessment and verdict

What works under this Act is the architecture nobody celebrates. The degree definition has kept a single national currency of qualifications across a system that the All India Survey on Higher Education for 2021-22 counted at 1,168 universities and university-level institutions, 45,473 colleges and 12,002 stand-alone institutions, enrolling 4.33 crore students with a gross enrolment ratio of 28.4; no competing account of how that currency would be maintained in a system of this size, without a statutory gatekeeper of the word degree, has been produced by any committee, draft bill or policy in the seventy years of the argument. The qualifications regulations, for all their rigidity, created a national floor under academic appointment that did not previously exist, and the courts have given that floor effect against state governments themselves. The information and list-keeping functions, the published lists of universities, of institutions deemed to be universities and of fake universities, are a public good that costs little and saves individual students large sums and wasted years every admission season.

What does not work is equally plain. The penalty in Section 24 is derisory and always was going to become so. The grant sanction in Section 14 is too weak and too slow to discipline a large university and too dangerous to use against a small one. The fee power of Section 12A was left substantially unused while capitation flourished in the system’s unregulated corners. The inspection regime under Section 13 produces reports rather than consequences. The affiliation system, under which tens of thousands of colleges are taught to the standards of universities that cannot possibly supervise them, is the system’s largest quality failure and lies almost entirely outside the Act’s effective reach, because affiliation is a creature of state university Acts. And the Commission’s own constitution, an appointed body under a policy-direction power, has never acquired the independent standing that would let it confront either a ministry that wishes to multiply institutions or a state government that wishes to appoint an unqualified vice chancellor on equal terms.

It sharpens the verdict to state what any successor statute must answer, because the list explains why the drafting of successors keeps failing at the same points. A successor must say who specifies degrees and their nomenclature, and under whose approval. It must say by what process institutions enter the degree class and by what process, with what protection for enrolled students, they leave it. It must say who funds universities, and whether the funder’s distance from the regulator is to be preserved as a matter of law or abandoned as a fiction. It must say how the standards of the Union are to be enforced against universities of the states without converting the standards power into a general power of government over universities, and it must find words for that boundary that survive the appointment cases rather than pretend the cases were not decided. It must say what becomes of the non-regulatory inheritance: the lists, the eligibility test, the fellowships, the library network and the inter-university centres. And it must say what penalty, proportioned and appealable, replaces the one thousand rupees of Section 24. The Bill of 2025 answers several of these questions and is being examined on the rest by the joint committee; the draft of 2018 answered fewer; the policy of 2020 described the architecture and left the questions to a statute it could not itself supply. The Act of 1956 answers all of them, in some cases badly, and a bad answer in force governs over a good answer in a report. That, in the end, is the whole of the Commission’s defence, and it has been sufficient for seventy years.

The verdict follows from the article’s claim. Successive reform proposals, from the National Knowledge Commission through the Yash Pal Committee, the draft of 2018, the policy of 2020 and the Bill of 2025, agree on the diagnosis and divide on the successor, and they divide on the successor for a reason the diagnosis does not touch: each design must say who holds the degree monopoly and the standards pen on the day after commencement, and each answer either recreates a body that looks like the Commission with its functions renamed, as the four verticals of the policy do, or concentrates the functions in a body more centralised and more ministerial than the Commission it replaces, as the critics of the Bill of 2025 charge. The Commission survives not because the case for it is strong but because the case against its successors is never answered at the point where it matters. A body recommended for replacement across fifteen years and two governments, with a drafted repeal bill never introduced and an introduced repeal bill resting with a joint committee, is the series thesis of this cluster in one institution: institutional reform stalls even when the diagnosis is agreed, because the functions outlast the body, and any successor must be built to perform the least popular of them. The power is in the degree, not the grant; and until a Parliament is willing to say, in a statute, whose degree power it shall be, the Act of 1956 will continue to be the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What powers does the University Grants Commission have?

The Commission’s powers are spread across the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 rather than gathered in one section. Section 12 gives it a general duty to promote and coordinate university education and to determine and maintain standards of teaching, examination and research, with enumerated powers to inquire into financial needs, allocate and disburse grants, recommend measures to universities, advise governments, collect information and require universities to furnish it. Around that core sit the sharper instruments: the fitness gate for grants in Section 12B, inspection under Section 13, withholding of grants under Section 14, the fee and donation power in Section 12A, the specification of degrees under Section 22, and the regulation-making power in Section 26, under which the qualifications of teachers and the minimum standards for degrees are prescribed.

Q: What makes an institution a deemed to be university?

An institution becomes deemed to be a university by declaration, not by incorporation. Under Section 3 of the Act, the Central Government may, on the advice of the Commission, declare by notification in the Official Gazette that an institution for higher education other than a university shall be deemed to be a university for the purposes of the Act, and from that declaration the whole Act applies to it as if it were a university, including the degree power in Section 22. The institution’s own legal personality does not change; a trust or society remains a trust or society. What changes is its position inside the Act. The criteria, the application process, the governance conditions and the grounds on which a declaration may be withdrawn are set by the Commission’s regulations for institutions deemed to be universities, recast in 2023 after the review of the sector conducted by the Tandon Committee in 2009.

Q: Who can award a degree in India?

Only three classes of institution. Section 22(1) of the Act confines the right of conferring or granting degrees to a university established or incorporated by or under a Central Act, a provincial Act or a State Act; an institution deemed to be a university under Section 3; and an institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament to confer or grant degrees, which is the route used by the institutes of technology, the institutes of management and other institutions of national importance acting under their own statutes. Section 22(2) bars every other person and authority from conferring or granting a degree, or holding itself out as entitled to do so, and Section 22(3) reserves to the Commission, with the approval of the Central Government, the specification of what counts as a degree. A college cannot award a degree; its students receive the degree of the university to which the college is affiliated.

Q: Can the UGC regulate fees?

The Act gives the Commission a fee power, but a narrow and largely unused one. Section 12A, inserted by the Amendment Act of 1984, empowers the Commission, where it is satisfied in the public interest after consulting the universities concerned, to specify by regulations the matters for which fees may be charged and the scale of fees for a course of study, and where such regulations exist no college providing that course may charge other fees, charge above the scale, or accept any payment, donation or gift from a student in connection with admission. Breach can cost the college its right to present students for the qualification and its affiliation for three years. In practice the fees of professional education have been governed mainly by state legislation, fee committees and the constitutional case law on unaided institutions, and the Commission’s general power over fees remains the sleeping provision of the Act rather than its working one.

Q: Are UGC regulations legally binding?

Yes, within their field. The Commission’s regulations are subordinate legislation made under Section 26 of the Act, and they have the force of law on the subjects the section lists: the qualifications required of persons appointed to the teaching staff of a university, the minimum standards of instruction for the grant of any degree, the maintenance of standards and the coordination of work and facilities in universities, and the related matters added in 1984. The Supreme Court has held that the regulations bind state universities and prevail over inconsistent provisions of state university Acts in the field of standards, most consequentially in the cases on vice chancellor appointments. The binding force has limits: a regulation must trace to Section 26, must be consistent with the Act and the rules, and certain subjects require the previous approval of the Central Government. Regulations are not a general power to govern universities in all respects.

Q: Why has abolishing the UGC been proposed?

The proposal has been made repeatedly by the state’s own expert bodies, and the indictment has three consistent counts. The first is a conflict of roles: a body that funds universities and also regulates them will soften its regulation of the institutions it pays for, and its grant function exposes it to the charge that money follows influence rather than standards. The second is the character of its regulation, described as input-based and micro-managerial, prescribing the conditions of teaching in detail while measuring outcomes weakly. The third is its record: the deemed university inflation of the years before the Tandon review and the unreformed affiliating system are laid at its door. The National Knowledge Commission recommended an independent regulatory authority in its place, the Yash Pal Committee recommended a national commission for higher education and research in 2009, the draft bill of 2018 and the National Education Policy of 2020 carried the proposal forward, and the Bill of 2025 is its latest legislative vehicle.

Q: What is the Higher Education Commission of India proposal?

It is the proposal, carried in successive forms since 2018, to repeal the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 and replace the Commission with a new body that regulates without funding. In the draft Higher Education Commission of India Bill circulated for public comment in June 2018, the proposed commission would have held the academic and regulatory functions while grant-making moved to the ministry; that draft was never introduced in Parliament. The National Education Policy of 2020 restated the design as an umbrella Higher Education Commission of India working through four verticals: a regulatory council, an accreditation council, a grants council and a standards council, with medical and legal education outside it. A policy creates no law, and the proposal acquired a bill only in December 2025, when the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill was introduced in the Lok Sabha in a related but different form, with three councils and funding left with the ministry. That bill stands referred to a joint committee and has not been enacted.

Q: Can the UGC prescribe how a vice chancellor is appointed?

It can prescribe the qualifications for the office and the composition and working of the search committee that recommends candidates, and the courts have upheld that power against state universities. The Commission’s regulations on minimum qualifications have long regulated the appointment of vice chancellors, and in Kalyani Mathivanan v. K. V. Jeyaraj in 2015 the Supreme Court held that the regulation prescribing the search committee binds state universities and that an appointment made through a non-conforming process cannot stand; later decisions in 2019 and 2022 set aside appointments on the same ground. The Commission does not appoint any vice chancellor; appointment is made by the Chancellor or Visitor under the university’s own Act. What the regulations govern is the standard of the process, and the dispute between the Commission and several state governments is whether the composition of the selection committee is a standard of that kind or an act of university self-government reserved to the states.

Q: When was the University Grants Commission set up and why?

Twice, in two different legal forms. The Commission was first set up as an executive body and inaugurated on 28 December 1953 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the Union Minister of Education, following the recommendation of the University Education Commission chaired by Dr S. Radhakrishnan, which reported in 1949 and proposed a grants body on the model of the British University Grants Committee. It was given statutory form by the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, Act 3 of 1956, which received assent on 3 March 1956 and came into force on 5 November 1956. The reason for the body was a gap in the constitutional scheme: education belonged to the provinces and then the states, which created and ran the universities, while the Union had both the money for university development and the Entry 66 responsibility for coordination and standards. The Commission was built to stand in that gap, funding without administering and standardising without governing.

Q: Who appoints the members of the University Grants Commission?

The Central Government appoints every member. Under Section 5 of the Act, as substituted by the Amendment Act of 1972, the Commission consists of a Chairman, a Vice-Chairman and ten other members, all appointed by the Central Government, and every appointment takes effect from its notification in the Official Gazette. The section rations the government’s own presence inside the body it appoints: the Chairman must be chosen from among persons who are not officers of the Central Government or of any state government; of the ten other members, two are officers of the Central Government representing it, not less than four must be teachers of universities at the time they are chosen, and the remainder are drawn from fields such as agriculture, commerce, forestry and industry, from the learned professions, and from vice chancellors and educationists of repute, at least half of that group also being non-officials. Members hold office for a term of six years under Section 6.

Q: How can a student check whether a university is recognised by the UGC?

By checking documents rather than branding, in a fixed order. First, identify the institution’s legal basis: the Act that established it, the Gazette notification that declared it deemed to be a university, or the Act of Parliament that specially empowers it, because degree power under Section 22 comes only from those three routes. Second, find the institution on the Commission’s published lists of universities and of institutions deemed to be universities, and note its position under Section 2(f) and, for institutions established after the 1972 amendment, the fitness declaration under Section 12B. Third, check the particular programme and mode: a lawfully established university can still offer a distance, online or off-campus programme outside its entitlement, so the programme itself must be covered by the applicable regulations. Fourth, check the Commission’s published list of fake universities; absence from the lists and presence on that one is decisive against the institution. A prospectus claim of approval, without the documents behind it, verifies nothing.

Q: What happens if an institution awards a degree without legal authority?

The qualification is not a degree in law, and that consequence matters more than the penalty. Under Section 22(2) no person or authority outside the three classes in Section 22(1) may confer or grant a degree or hold itself out as entitled to do so, and Section 24 makes contravention of Sections 22 and 23 punishable with a fine that may extend to one thousand rupees, with members of an association who knowingly authorise the contravention liable to the same fine. The fine is derisory and prosecutions are rare. The operative consequences are that universities refuse the qualification for admission, employers refuse it for posts that require a degree, and the Commission names the institution on its published list of fake universities. A student who has paid for such a qualification is left to remedies for misrepresentation and refund against the institution, and to reporting it to the Commission and the police; the degree itself cannot be validated after the event.

Q: What is a fake university and what should a student do about one?

A fake university, in the usage of the Commission, is an institution that presents itself as a university, and offers degrees, without any of the legal bases Section 22 requires: it is not established by a Central or State Act, it is not declared deemed to be a university under Section 3, and it is not specially empowered by an Act of Parliament. Some are bare inventions trading on a name; others are real teaching operations whose promoters never obtained, or lost, a legal foundation. The Commission publishes a list of institutions it designates as fake universities and warns students against them. A student who finds an institution on that list, or who cannot find its establishing Act or Gazette notification at all, should not enrol and should not pay; a student already enrolled should preserve the admission documents and payment records, verify the position against the Commission’s lists in writing, and pursue refund and complaint remedies promptly, because the qualification being accumulated will not be recognised as a degree whatever the institution promises.

Q: What do Section 2(f) and Section 12B status mean for a university?

They are the two entries that together place a university inside the recognised and fundable system. Section 2(f) is the Act’s definition of a university: a university established or incorporated by or under a Central Act, a provincial Act or a State Act, including an institution recognised by the Commission in connection with such a university under its regulations. Inclusion in the Commission’s list under Section 2(f) is the working evidence that the institution is a university for the purposes of the Act and that its degrees fall within Section 22. Section 12B, inserted by the Amendment Act of 1972, is the fitness gate for money: no grant may be given by the Central Government, the Commission or any organisation receiving central funds to a university established after that amendment commenced, unless the Commission has declared the university fit to receive the grant. A university can hold 2(f) status without 12B status; it is then a real university whose degrees are valid but which stands outside central grant funding.

Q: Can the UGC stop grants to a university that ignores its recommendations?

Yes, and that is the only general sanction the Act gives it over universities. Under Section 14, if a university fails within a reasonable time to comply with a recommendation made by the Commission under Section 12 or following an inspection under Section 13, the Commission may, after considering any cause the university shows for its failure, withhold from the university the grants proposed to be made out of the Fund of the Commission. The limits define the power. It reaches only the Commission’s own grants, so its weight depends on how much of the university’s income flows through the Commission, which is substantial for a central university and modest for most state universities. It requires a prior recommendation, a reasonable time to comply and consideration of the university’s explanation, so it operates as a considered withholding at the end of a process rather than as a fine. It cannot close a university, cancel an examination or remove an officer.

Q: Is a degree earned through open and distance learning valid in India?

It is valid if two conditions are both satisfied, and students lose qualifications by checking only one of them. The awarding institution must itself be within Section 22: a university established by an Act, an institution deemed to be a university, or an institution specially empowered by Parliament, which covers the open universities established by their own Acts. And the programme must have been offered within the Commission’s regulations governing open and distance learning and online programmes, recast in 2020, which determine which institutions may teach at a distance or online, in which programmes, and within what territorial reach. A degree from a genuine university earned under a distance programme the university was not entitled to run, or run from centres outside its jurisdiction, has repeatedly been treated as defective in litigation and in service matters. The mode of study does not diminish a degree; study outside the entitlement does.

Q: What qualifications does the UGC prescribe for university teachers?

The Commission prescribes them by regulation under Section 26(1)(e), which empowers it to define the qualifications that should ordinarily be required of any person appointed to the teaching staff of a university. The regulations on minimum qualifications for appointment and promotion of teachers and academic staff, in the line running through the regulations of 2010 and 2018, build the framework: prescribed academic qualifications at master’s level, the National Eligibility Test or a doctorate earned under the prescribed conditions as the eligibility gate for appointment as assistant professor, prescribed experience and attainment for associate professor and professor, and rules for the composition of selection committees and for career advancement. The Supreme Court upheld the prescription of the eligibility test against challenge in University of Delhi v. Raj Singh in 1994. A draft set of replacement regulations released for consultation in January 2025 proposed changes to eligibility and to the selection process for vice chancellors; it met concerted opposition from several state governments and was not notified as final regulations in that process.

Q: Why does the Constitution let Parliament set standards for universities?

Because a degree is a national currency and its denominations cannot be set separately in every state. Entry 66 of the Union List gives Parliament the power to legislate for the coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions, and the University Grants Commission Act is the statute enacted under it. Education otherwise sits with the states and, since the Forty-second Amendment of 1976, in the Concurrent List as Entry 25, which is expressly subject to Entry 66 and its neighbouring entries. The result is a deliberate division: the states establish, incorporate, fund and administer their universities, while the Union coordinates the system and determines the standards that make one university’s degree intelligible and acceptable to another and to employers across the country. The courts have read Entry 66 accordingly, holding that central standards norms prevail over inconsistent state provisions in the field of standards, while establishment and administration remain with the states.

Q: Can the UGC withdraw deemed to be university status from an institution?

The status is withdrawn through the process that created it, and the attempt to do it by a shortcut produced the leading episode in the Act’s history. A declaration under Section 3 is made by the Central Government on the advice of the Commission, and withdrawal travels by the same route, under the conditions the Commission’s regulations for institutions deemed to be universities prescribe, which since the recast of 2023 include an express scheme for withdrawal where the conditions of status fail, with protection for students already enrolled. In 2009 the Tandon Committee reviewed 126 deemed institutions and found 44 unfit to retain the status, and the government moved to withdraw it on the strength of the report. The institutions litigated, the Supreme Court maintained the status quo, and in January 2014 the Court directed the Commission itself to decide the status of the 44 afresh, in accordance with law and after notice, recording that it had approved none of the reports. The mass withdrawal did not happen; the decision was returned to the statutory regulator and its own process.

Q: What is the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill and has it replaced the UGC?

No. The Commission continues to exist and to govern under the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, and nothing has replaced it. The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 is a bill: it was approved by the Union Cabinet on 12 December 2025 and introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025 by the Union Minister of Education. It proposes a single apex commission for higher education working through three councils for regulation, accreditation and standards, replacing the Commission and the technical and teacher education councils, with grant-making placed in the administrative ministry and penalties for contravention running from ten lakh rupees to two crore rupees. On 16 December 2025 the Lok Sabha referred the Bill to a Joint Committee of both Houses. The committee’s draft report, circulated in July 2026, warned against concentrating extensive regulatory powers in a single central regulator, and in August 2026 the Lok Sabha extended the committee’s time until the last week of the Winter Session of 2026. A bill under examination by a committee is a proposal, not a law.