Every argument about the autonomy of an Indian public institution is, underneath the rhetoric, an argument about a small number of clauses in a small number of statutes. The central institution Acts that govern the central universities, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the National Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management all speak warmly of academic freedom, and they speak in almost identical words. What differs between them, sharply and measurably, is the appointment machinery: who selects the head of the institution, who selects the people who select the head, and how many of the seats around the governing table are filled from outside the institution and by whom. This comparison reads the four statutes side by side on the dimensions that decide the question, and its conclusion can be stated at the outset. Autonomy in Indian higher education law is an appointments question. A statute that proclaims freedom in its objects clause and retains the appointments in its operative clauses has granted nothing that a determined government cannot take back without amending a word of the freedom language, because the people appointed under the retained power will do the taking themselves.

That claim is testable, and this article tests it provision by provision. The comparison covers the degree-granting power, the architecture of the governing body, the role of the Visitor, the funding route, the councils that sit above the individual institutions, and the ease or difficulty of changing the rules themselves. Two cautions govern everything that follows. The first is that a model is not uniform inside its own statute: the central university sector contains universities governed by the single Act of 2009 and older universities governed by their own Acts reaching back a century, and the differences inside the model matter and are flagged where they arise. The second is that the management institute model changed fundamentally in 2023, only six years after it was created, and any comparison that quotes the 2017 text without the amendment is describing a statute that no longer operates. The depth of the management statute and its amendment belongs to the dedicated article on that Act; here it is summarised and linked, as the comparison requires, but not duplicated.

The central institution Acts at a glance

Four statutes carry the weight of the comparison, and a fifth body of law stands behind all of them. The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961, Act 59 of 1961, is the eldest. Its Section 2 declares the named institutes of technology to be institutions of national importance, and it built the template the later statutes copied: a Visitor, a Board of Governors for each institute, a Senate for academic matters, and a Council above the institutes chaired by the Union minister responsible for technical education. The National Institutes of Technology Act, 2007, Act 29 of 2007, assented to on 5 June 2007 and brought into force on 15 August 2007, applied the same template to the regional engineering colleges taken into the central system, and the amendment of 2012, Act 28 of 2012, renamed it the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act, 2007 and brought the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research inside its schedules, with a further amendment in 2014 adding the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur. The Central Universities Act, 2009, Act 25 of 2009, received assent on 20 March 2009 and was deemed to have come into force on 15 January 2009, the date of the ordinance it replaced; as passed it established twelve new central universities and converted three state universities into central ones, and later amendments have inserted further universities into it one by one, including a central university and a central tribal university for Andhra Pradesh, the Sindhu Central University, the Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya and the Sammakka Sarakka Central Tribal University. The Indian Institutes of Management Act, 2017, Act 33 of 2017, received assent on 31 December 2017 and came into force on 31 January 2018; it declared the management institutes to be institutions of national importance, converted them from registered societies into statutory bodies, and conferred the degree-granting power they had lacked throughout their existence. The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2023, Act 23 of 2023, assented to on 11 August 2023 and in force from 16 August 2023, then reworked the governance of that model in the direction of the older statutes and, in the same operation, converted the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai into the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai.

The scale governed by these texts is recorded in the answers the Ministry of Education has laid before Parliament: twenty-three Indian Institutes of Technology, twenty-one Indian Institutes of Management and thirty-one National Institutes of Technology, with seven Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research recorded in the ministry’s published lists of institutions of national importance. The central universities number more than fifty on the consolidated list maintained by the University Grants Commission, but they are not all governed by the Act of 2009, and the distinction is the first place where a flattening comparison goes wrong. Banaras Hindu University rests on the Banaras Hindu University Act, 1915, Aligarh Muslim University on the Aligarh Muslim University Act, 1920, the University of Delhi on the Delhi University Act, 1922, Jawaharlal Nehru University on the Jawaharlal Nehru University Act, 1966 and the University of Hyderabad on its Act of 1974, to name the best known. Each of those statutes has its own Visitor, Chancellor and appointment provisions, broadly similar in architecture to the 2009 template but different in detail, and each was written for one institution rather than for a class. Where this article states the central university position, it states the position under the Central Universities Act, 2009 and its model Statutes, and says so; the older Acts are a family resemblance, not a single text, and the reader who needs the position of a particular older university must read that university’s own Act.

Behind all four models stands the constitutional frame. Parliament’s power to declare an institution of national importance comes from the Union List: Entry 64 covers institutions for scientific or technical education financed wholly or in part by the Government of India and declared by Parliament by law to be institutions of national importance, and Entry 63 covers the institutions named at the commencement of the Constitution and others declared by Parliament. The declaration is therefore a parliamentary act with constitutional consequences for legislative competence, a point developed where this comparison reaches the federal dimension of the education cluster in the article on education and the Concurrent List. Entry 66, the power of coordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education, is the entry behind the University Grants Commission, and the standards power runs across every model in this comparison, including the ones that look most independent. No statute in this family escapes it, and the honest comparison is not between institutions inside and outside central control but between different distributions of central control.

Degrees: the one power every model grants

The degree is where the four models converge most completely, and the convergence is itself instructive. A degree in Indian law is a creature of statute. The University Grants Commission Act, 1956, Act 3 of 1956, provides in Section 22 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 of that Act, or by an institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament to confer or grant degrees. The institute statutes in this comparison operate through that third route. Each of them carries its own degree clause, in materially identical words. Section 6 of the Institutes of Technology Act empowers every institute to hold examinations and grant degrees, diplomas and other academic distinctions or titles. Section 6 of the National Institutes of Technology, Science Education and Research Act repeats the formula almost word for word. Section 7 of the Indian Institutes of Management Act empowers every institute to conduct examinations and to grant degrees, diplomas and other academic distinctions. Section 6 of the Central Universities Act empowers the university to confer degrees and other academic distinctions on the basis of examinations, evaluation or any other method of testing, and to withdraw them for good and sufficient cause. The full working of the degree monopoly, including the specification of what counts as a degree and the penalties for usurping the word university, is traced in the article on the UGC Act and the degree framework, and this comparison does not re-cover it; what matters here is the structural point.

The structural point is that degree power was never the variable. Three of the four models held it from the start, because each was created by a statute that conferred it in terms. The management institutes were the exception that proves the analysis: for decades they held no degree power at all, not because anyone doubted their standing but because they were registered societies, and a society cannot confer a degree within Section 22 however eminent its faculty. Their graduates received a postgraduate diploma, and the diploma’s equivalence for public employment and further study rested on administrative recognition rather than on law. The Act of 2017 changed the legal character of the qualification overnight by changing the legal character of the institution, which is why the degree versus diploma question, still argued by people who have not read the Act, has a short statutory answer. The institutes award degrees because Parliament said they may, in Section 7 of their own Act, and the route is the same third route of Section 22 through which the technology institutes had awarded degrees since 1961.

The diploma decades repay a closer look, because they show what a missing degree clause actually costs and what it does not. The management institutes’ postgraduate diploma was never treated in the labour market as a lesser qualification: the Association of Indian Universities accorded it equivalence with a master’s degree for academic purposes, government recruitment treated it as satisfying degree requirements in the ordinary way, and the institutes’ placement record was the strongest in Indian professional education. What the diploma lacked was not standing but self-sufficiency. Every element of its recognition was borrowed: equivalence granted by an association’s resolution, eligibility accepted by employers’ rules, admission to doctoral programmes abroad negotiated institution by institution. A degree under Section 22 needs no one’s resolution, because the statute itself is the recognition, valid against every employer, every university and every foreign credential evaluator who accepts Indian law as the source of the qualification. The difference showed at the margins that matter to individuals: the graduate who needed a visa category defined by degrees, the public competition whose rules were amended by a draftsman who wrote degree where diploma had previously been accepted, the doctoral admission that turned on nomenclature. The Act of 2017 is therefore misdescribed when it is described only as an autonomy statute. It was also, and for most graduates primarily, a qualifications statute, converting a borrowed recognition into a legal entitlement, and the conversion was achieved by the same move that created the governance question, the move from society to statute. The two halves of the Act cannot be separated: the degree power was the consideration for the governance chapter, and the argument about the Act ever since has been an argument about whether the price, in whichever direction it is reckoned, was the right one.

Do these statutes protect academic decisions in the same terms?

Substantially, yes. Each statute lodges academic control in an academic body, a Senate in the technology statutes and an Academic Council in the university and management statutes, and gives it control and general regulation of instruction, education and examination in similar language. The academic clauses are the most alike provisions in the four Acts; the appointment clauses the least alike.

Beneath the similarity sit two differences a careful reader should register. The first is the power of review above the academic body. Under Section 13 of the Institutes of Technology Act, the Board of Governors is responsible for the general superintendence, direction and control of the affairs of the institute and has the express power to review the acts of the Senate. The university model interposes no equivalent general review of the Academic Council by the Executive Council in the same terms; the Academic Council is the statutory authority for academic matters and the Executive Council’s supremacy runs to executive action. The second difference is the presence, in the technology statutes, of a council above the institution with an advisory remit over degrees and admission standards themselves, examined in its own section below. Neither difference disturbs the headline finding. On the text of the four Acts, a professor’s protection against interference with a syllabus, an examination or a research programme is broadly constant across the sector. What varies is who chose the director or vice chancellor who administers that protection, and who chose the board that can review, fund or starve the unit asserting it. That is the sense in which the academic clauses, for all their warmth, are not where autonomy is decided.

The standards overlay that no model escapes

Before the appointment comparison begins, one limit on every model must be fixed, because it qualifies all of them equally. The University Grants Commission’s jurisdiction over standards rests on Entry 66 of the Union List and is exercised through the functions in Section 12 of its Act and the regulations made under Section 26, and it reaches the central universities at every point: the qualifications of their teachers, the specification of their degrees, the composition of the committees that recommend their vice chancellors, the conditions on which their grants are paid. A central university is autonomous, on this comparison, in the governance of itself; it is not autonomous in the definition of the qualifications it awards or the eligibility of the people it appoints to teach, and the Supreme Court’s insistence in the Gujarat and Kerala cases of 2022 that a vice chancellor appointed outside the regulations is no vice chancellor at all shows the overlay operating at the very point, the head’s appointment, where the university model otherwise scores highest. The institutes stand differently. The technology and management institutes are not universities within the Commission’s Act, are not funded through it, and do not take its regulations as their governing law; their standards discipline arrives through their own councils, their boards and the expectations of the professions they serve. The All India Council for Technical Education, which licenses and approves technical institutions across the country, does not license them either: the Supreme Court held in the Bharathidasan University case in 2001 that the Council’s role in relation to universities is advisory rather than approving, and the parliamentary institutes have never stood in the queue for its approval.

The consequence for the comparison is that autonomy has a ceiling set outside all four statutes. The most independent board in this family, the management board of 2017, could appoint its director and set its fees, but it could not redefine what a degree is, since Section 22 and the Commission’s specification power govern the currency its qualifications are paid in; it could not appoint a director whom the law of the land disqualified, since eligibility floors in education law are not the board’s to write; and it held its autonomy under a statute that the same Parliament could amend, as the event proved. Autonomy in this sector is therefore always autonomy within a frame: the frame of the degree monopoly, the frame of audit, the frame of the amending power. The interesting variation, and the whole subject of this article, lies inside the frame, in the distribution of the appointments. Readers who meet the claim that a given institution is fully autonomous, or wholly controlled, should ask which layer of the frame the claim is about. Most public argument fails by confusing the layers, attributing to the appointment clauses a servitude that belongs to the standards overlay, or crediting the appointment clauses with a freedom the overlay quietly removes.

A persistent error should be cleared at this layer, because it inverts the analysis wherever it appears. These institutions are sometimes described as regulated by a higher education commission, in anticipation of the successive proposals to replace the University Grants Commission with a single regulator for the sector. No such commission exists in law. The proposals, in the draft Bill of 2018 and in later versions debated since, have not displaced the statutory position: the Commission established by the Act of 1956 remains the standards body, the institute councils remain the technology system’s coordinators, and the boards remain what their Acts made them. Analysis that assumes the proposed regulator already governs will misplace every power this article has located, which is a further instance of the series rule that in legislation the enacted text, and only the enacted text, is the fact.

Who appoints whom: the comparison in one object

The findable artifact of this article is the table that most comparisons of Indian higher education never print. It takes the four offices through which institutional power actually flows, the head of the institution, the chairperson of the governing body, the members of the governing body, and the academic body, and states for each model who appoints, nominates or constitutes it. Read down the column of any model and the model’s theory of control stands revealed; read across the row for the governing body’s members and the decisive difference in the whole comparison appears, because that row, and no other, determines whether a board is an external check on the executive, an extension of the government of the day, or a self-renewing college of the institution’s own choosing.

Office	Central university (Central Universities Act, 2009)	Indian Institute of Technology (Institutes of Technology Act, 1961)	National Institute of Technology and IISER (NITSER Act, 2007)	Indian Institute of Management (IIM Act, 2017, as enacted)	Indian Institute of Management (after the Amendment Act, 2023)
Head of the institution	The Visitor appoints the Vice-Chancellor from a panel recommended by a committee of five, three nominated by the Executive Council and two by the Visitor, under Statute 2 of the Second Schedule	The Council appoints the Director, with the prior approval of the Visitor, under Section 17	The Visitor appoints the Director, on the recommendation of a Selection Committee constituted by the Visitor, under Section 17	The Board appoints the Director, on the recommendation of a search-cum-selection committee constituted by the Board, under Section 16	The Board appoints the Director with the prior approval of the Visitor, the selection procedure is prescribed by the Central Government, and the Visitor may terminate the Director’s services, under Section 16 as amended
Chairperson of the governing body	The Vice-Chancellor chairs the Executive Council by virtue of office; the Chancellor, the ceremonial head, is appointed by the Visitor from a panel of not fewer than three names recommended by the Executive Council, under Statute 1	The Chairman of the Board of Governors is nominated by the Visitor, under Section 11	The Chairperson of the Board of Governors is nominated by the Visitor, under Section 11	The Board appoints its own Chairperson from among eminent persons in industry, education, science, technology, management or public administration, under Section 10 as enacted	The Chairperson is nominated by the Visitor, under Section 10 as amended
Members of the governing body	The Executive Council is constituted under the university’s Statutes, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor and built principally from the university’s own officers, deans and teachers, with a small number of external members nominated under the Statutes	The Director ex officio; one nominee of the government of each state in the institute’s zone, chosen from technologists or industrialists of repute; four persons of special knowledge in education, engineering or science nominated by the Council; two professors nominated by the Senate, under Section 11	The Director ex officio; two nominees of the Central Government of joint secretary rank; two nominees of the host state government; two nominees of the Council, at least one a woman; two faculty members nominated by the Senate; the Director of the zonal Indian Institute of Technology or a nominee, under Section 11	A board of up to nineteen: one nominee of the Central Government and one of the state government; every other seat filled by the Board itself, through four eminent persons it nominates, faculty members nominated by the Chairperson, and up to five persons co-opted from alumni and the former society, under Section 10 as enacted	The composition of Section 10 is retained, but the Chairperson who leads the Board is the Visitor’s nominee, and the Board’s choice of Director requires the Visitor’s prior approval
The academic body	The Academic Council, constituted under Section 22 of the Act and the Statutes, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor	The Senate: the Director as chairman, the Deputy Director, all professors of the institute, and three external educationists nominated by the Chairman in consultation with the Director, one each from science, engineering and humanities, under Section 14	The Senate, constituted under the Act and the Statutes and chaired by the Director	The Academic Council of the institute, which determines academic content, admission criteria and process, and examination guidelines	Unchanged by the amendment

Three features of the table deserve emphasis before the detail sections take each model apart. The first is that the Visitor, who is the President of India acting on the advice of the Union government, appears in every column and in almost every row. The presidency is the common hinge of the entire sector: there is no model in this comparison in which the head of the institution takes office without the Visitor’s appointment, nomination or prior approval somewhere in the chain. The second is that the models differ not in whether the Centre is present but in how many links of the chain it holds directly. In the university model the Visitor holds the first link, the choice of the head, but takes the choice from a panel built mostly by the university’s own Executive Council. In the technology models the Visitor holds the chairmanship of the board and an approval or appointment at the head’s level, while the board itself is assembled from governmental and council nominations. In the management model as enacted in 2017 the Visitor held almost nothing, and the Board held everything, including the choice of its own chairperson and, through the search committee it constituted, the choice of the Director. The third feature is the direction of travel in 2023: every change the amendment made moved a link from the Board’s side of the table to the Visitor’s. The amendment is therefore the cleanest natural experiment Indian institutional law offers on the question this article asks, because it changed nothing about the academic clauses, nothing about the degree power, nothing about the objects of the institutes, and a great deal about appointments, and it was defended and attacked by both sides entirely in the language of autonomy. Both sides, by their conduct, conceded the thesis.

The governing bodies, counted member by member

The row that decides everything is the third row, and it rewards a slower count. Begin with the technology institute board under Section 11 of the Act of 1961. Setting the Chairman and the Director aside, the board consists of one nominee of the government of each state comprising the institute’s zone, four nominees of the Council, and two professors nominated by the Senate. The zone nomination is the federal element: the states of the region sit at the table of an institution the Centre funds, chosen from among technologists or industrialists of repute in the state government’s opinion. The Council’s four nominees are the system’s element: the coordinating body chaired by the Union minister places a third or more of a typical board. The Senate’s two professors are the internal element, and they are a minority by construction. Counted by source, an institute of technology board is a body in which the institution itself, speaking through its Senate, supplies two voices, and every other voice arrives by nomination from a government or from a council the government chairs. The board is nevertheless a real board, with the general superintendence of the institute under Section 13, because the nominating authorities are plural and none of them commands the whole table; the design disperses appointment power widely enough that no single appointer owns the board, while ensuring that the institution never appoints its own governors.

The National Institutes of Technology board under Section 11 of the Act of 2007 is the same philosophy with the arithmetic tightened. The board is smaller and the governmental share is larger and more precisely specified: two nominees of the Central Government, drawn from officers not below the rank of joint secretary dealing with technical education and finance, hold their seats by the Act’s own command, and two nominees of the host state government sit beside them. The Council nominates two members, at least one of whom must be a woman, from persons of special knowledge in education, engineering or science. The Senate nominates two faculty members. The Director of the Indian Institute of Technology in whose zone the institute falls, or a professorial nominee, completes the board, a provision that writes the hierarchy of the technical education system into the statute: the older institute supervises the younger by sitting on its board. Of the eleven seats, the institution’s own Senate supplies two, and the remaining nine arrive from the Visitor, the two governments, the Council and the zonal institute. The 2007 draftsmen had the 1961 text before them and chose, deliberately, a board more directly held by the funding governments than the board of 1961. Anyone who describes the technology model as a single settlement has not counted both boards.

The central university’s Executive Council is a different species. Where the institute boards are governing bodies imposed on an institution from outside, the Executive Council is the university governing itself through its senior academic officers, with the Vice-Chancellor in the chair, the deans and senior teachers in the room, and a limited number of external members added under the Statutes. The university also possesses, in the Court constituted under Section 20 of the Act of 2009, a large deliberative body that reviews the university’s progress and policies, an institution with no counterpart in the institute statutes, whose weakness in practice is examined below. The Executive Council model gives the institution a governing body it substantially composes, which looks like the management model of 2017 and is not, because the head who chairs it, and who dominates it, is appointed by the Visitor from a panel, and because the Chancellor above the structure is also the Visitor’s appointee. The Centre holds the university model not by filling the council but by filling the two offices that frame it.

The management board as enacted in 2017 inverted every one of these choices. Section 10 made the Board of Governors the principal executive body of the institute and capped it at nineteen members. One seat went to a nominee of the Central Government and one to a nominee of the state government in whose territory the institute sits. Every other seat was filled from inside the board’s own processes: four eminent persons nominated by the Board itself, two faculty members nominated by the Chairperson, up to five persons co-opted by the Board from the alumni and from the members of the society that had run the institute before the Act, and the Director ex officio, with the Board designating from among these categories the members who satisfied the Act’s requirements on representation of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and of women. The Board appointed its own Chairperson. The Board constituted the search-cum-selection committee for the Director and appointed the Director on its recommendation. A reader who wants the distance between the models in a single sentence can have it here: under the Act of 2007 the institution’s own nominees hold two of eleven board seats, and under the Act of 2017 as enacted the institution’s board filled seventeen of nineteen. The amendment of 2023 did not disturb that composition. It did something subtler and, for the analysis, more valuable: it left the seventeen seats in place and took the chairmanship and the Director’s appointment away from the body that fills them, which is a parliamentary admission that the composition of a board matters less than the two appointments at its head.

What does the Court of a central university actually do?

The Court is the university’s large deliberative authority under Section 20 of the Act of 2009. It reviews the university’s broad policies and programmes, considers its annual report, accounts and audit report, and advises on matters referred to it. It is a forum of account rather than a governing body; executive power sits with the Executive Council.

The Court deserves its paragraph because comparisons of the models usually omit it, and the omission flatters the university model. On paper the central university is the most internally democratic of the four designs, with a Court that can run to a hundred members drawn from teachers, students, alumni and nominees, an Executive Council, an Academic Council and a Finance Committee under Section 24, a layered constitution resembling a small republic. In operation the Court meets rarely, its review is retrospective, and its composition is heavily nominated rather than elected, so the deliberative layer adds ceremony more readily than control. The institute statutes, which dispense with the Court entirely and put a compact nominated board in charge, are more honest about where power sits. The comparison therefore cuts against the instinct that more bodies mean more autonomy: the university model multiplies authorities while the Visitor appoints the head, and the management model of 2017 concentrated authority in one body and let that body appoint itself, and of the two designs the second delivered the greater practical independence for exactly as long as Parliament left it alone.

Inside the university model: the older Acts and their variations

The instruction that a comparison must not flatten differences inside a model applies with most force to the universities, and the variations repay listing because they show how much of the sector’s law is sediment rather than design. The Banaras Hindu University Act, 1915, Act 16 of 1915, is the oldest central university statute in force, written for a denominational foundation raised by public subscription, and its architecture, a Chancellor, a Vice-Chancellor appointed by the Visitor, a Court and an Executive Council, became the template the later university Acts inherited. The Aligarh Muslim University Act, 1920 added the complication of a minority foundation carried into a central statute, a duality the courts were still working through a century later. The Delhi University Act, 1922 produced the affiliating giant of the system, a university whose Executive Council governs not one campus but a federation of colleges, so that identical statutory words about executive power describe a wholly different quantum of authority from the same words in a unitary university’s Act. The Visva-Bharati Act, 1951 broke the pattern at the top: the Chancellor of Visva-Bharati is the Prime Minister, a deliberate choice for an institution founded by a poet rather than by a department, and its Visitor provisions sit alongside that anomaly. The Jawaharlal Nehru University Act, 1966 and the University of Hyderabad Act, 1974 wrote the template for the research-intensive postgraduate university. The Indira Gandhi National Open University Act, 1985 adapted it to distance education at a scale none of the founders imagined.

Three lessons follow for the comparison. The first is that the Chancellor’s office, decorative in the standard account, varies in substance: in most of these Acts the Chancellor is a figure of eminence appointed by the Visitor and presides at convocations and at the Court, but the office carries in several Acts a consultative role in the vice chancellor’s removal and a place in the appointment chain that a comparison ignoring it will misstate. The second is that the panel system for the vice chancellorship is not uniform across the older Acts: the composition of the search committee differs from Act to Act and from Statute to Statute, with the balance between the university’s nominees, the Visitor’s nominees and any governmental nominee struck differently in different decades, so that the distribution of the first move in the appointment, which this article has treated as decisive, is itself a variable inside the model. The third is that amendment practice differs: the Act of 2009 is amended as a class statute, one amendment moving every university under it, while an amendment to an older university’s governance requires its own Bill for its own Act, which partly explains why the older Acts preserve arrangements, on search committees and on the Court, that no draftsman would enact in that form again. A reformer who proposes to standardise the central university sector is proposing, in effect, to repeal and replace a dozen statutes of different vintages, each with its own alumni, its own litigation history and its own defenders; the comparison’s silence about the political difficulty of that project should not be mistaken for a judgment that the project is easy.

Finance inside the governing bodies

A word on the finance organs, because money inside the institution has its own appointment logic. The central university statute separates the functions: the Finance Committee constituted under Section 24 of the Act of 2009 examines the accounts and the budget and advises the Executive Council, which decides; the pattern keeps financial scrutiny one remove from executive decision and gives the university a specialised body in which the finance officer sits with nominees who can include persons from outside the university’s executive line. The institute boards fuse the functions: the Board of Governors itself considers and passes the annual accounts and budget estimates, under Section 13 of the Act of 1961, and submits them onward with the institute’s development plans to the Council, so the body that governs also holds the purse in the first instance, subject to the Council’s examination above it. The management Board likewise examines and approves the annual budget estimates of the institute under Section 11 of the Act of 2017, with no council above it in the original design to examine the examination. The pattern matches the appointment pattern at every point. Where the statute distrusts the institution, finance is layered, committee below council below government. Where the statute trusts the board, finance is single-tiered and the audit alone stands outside. A reader tracing a financial controversy in any of these institutions will find, once again, that the route of the money was drawn by the same hand, and with the same intention, as the route of the appointments.

Three vacancies, three chains: the appointment machinery at work

Abstract comparison hardens into fact when a vacancy occurs, so take the three principal models at the moment each must fill its highest office and follow the chain link by link. A vice chancellorship falls vacant in a university governed by the Act of 2009. The Executive Council nominates three of the five members of the committee that Statute 2 requires, and the Visitor nominates two, one of whom convenes the committee. The committee, whose members may not be employees of the university or members of any of its authorities, recommends a panel. The Visitor appoints from the panel, and if the Visitor approves none of the names, the Visitor may call for an extended fresh panel, which returns the process to the same committee rather than to any government shortlist. The person appointed holds office for five years or until the age of seventy, is not eligible for reappointment, and can be removed before the term ends only by the Visitor, on stated grounds, after a show cause opportunity and consultation with the Chancellor. Count the hands the file passes through and the distribution is visible: the university builds the recommending body by a majority of three to two, the Visitor chooses within the recommendation and holds the removal, and no ministry official touches the process at any point in the statutory text. The government’s influence enters, where it enters, through the Visitor’s two nominees and through the fact that the Visitor acts on advice; the statute’s own allocation gives the institution the first move and the Visitor the last word.

A directorship falls vacant in an institute of technology. The Council appoints, and the Council is not the institute’s body but the system’s: the minister chairs it, and around the table sit every other institute’s chairman and director, the heads of the research and standards bodies, government nominees and members of Parliament. The appointment requires the prior approval of the Visitor, so two external authorities, the system council and the presidency, stand between the vacancy and the appointment, and the institute itself, through its Board and its Senate, has no formal place in the chain at all, however much consultation practice supplies one. The successful candidate then takes office in an institution whose board chairman is the Visitor’s nominee and whose board the Council has stocked with four of its own nominees. The contrast with the university chain is not that one is political and the other pure; it is that the technology chain is systemic, designed in 1961 to keep a family of institutes coherent under a common standard of leadership, and its price is that no single institute chooses, or can veto, its own head.

A directorship falls vacant in a management institute, and here the comparison must be run twice, because the chain was rebuilt while the institutes were operating under it. Under the Act of 2017 as enacted, the Board constituted a search-cum-selection committee of its Chairperson and three members drawn from eminent administrators, industrialists and educationists; the committee recommended; the Board appointed; and no authority outside the institute’s own governance appears anywhere in the sequence. Under the Act as amended in 2023, the committee consists of the Chairperson, one nominee of the Visitor and two members from the widened field of eminent administrators, industrialists, educationists, scientists, technocrats and management specialists; the Board appoints only with the prior approval of the Visitor; the procedure of selection is prescribed by the Central Government; and if the appointment later fails, the Board’s power to remove requires the same prior approval, while the Visitor holds an independent power to terminate the Director’s services in the prescribed manner. The two chains differ at four separate links, recommendation, approval, procedure and exit, and at no link does the amended chain leave the Board alone with its choice. A reader who performs this exercise for any contested appointment in the sector, tracing the file rather than the speeches, will find that the exercise generalises: in every model the question of who governs resolves, on inspection, into the question of whose hands the file passes through, and in what order, and with what power to stop it.

Tenure completes the chain, because an appointment power is worth only what the term and the exit together make it worth. The vice chancellor’s five-year term under the Act of 2009, with the bar on reappointment and the age ceiling of seventy, is the strongest tenure design in the family: a head who cannot be renewed has no renewal to bargain for, and a Visitor who dislikes the incumbent must either endure the term or use the removal power on stated grounds after a hearing. The director of a management institute holds a five-year term under Section 16 of the Act of 2017, and the significance of the amendment of 2023 is sharpened by the tenure lens, since a term that the Visitor may cut short in the prescribed manner, and whose renewal passes through a Board the Visitor’s nominee chairs, disciplines its holder in a way the bare length of the term conceals. The technology directors hold their terms under their Acts and Statutes within the council system, secure against the institute’s own board, which did not appoint them, and exposed to the system that did. In each model the reader should therefore ask the tenure questions with the appointment questions: how long, renewable by whom, removable by whom, on what grounds, after what process. The five answers together are the head’s real constitution, and they predict the head’s conduct toward the appointing authority more reliably than any speech the head gives on taking office.

The Visitor: one office, four different weights

Section 8 of the Central Universities Act makes the President of India the Visitor of every university under the Act, and the section then builds the most elaborate supervisory jurisdiction in the family. The Visitor may cause an inspection of any department or building of the university, or an inquiry into its teaching, research, administration or finances, conducted by persons the Visitor appoints, with the university entitled to be represented and heard. The Visitor addresses the Vice-Chancellor with the results and advice; the Executive Council must report the action it proposes or has taken; and where the Council does not act to the Visitor’s satisfaction within a reasonable time, the Visitor may, after considering the Council’s explanation, issue directions the Council is bound to obey. Separately, and without prejudice to the inquiry route, the Visitor may by written order annul any proceeding of the university that is not in conformity with the Act, the Statutes or the Ordinances, after calling on the Registrar to show cause. The Visitor also appoints the Chancellor under Section 10 and the Vice-Chancellor under Section 11, in the manner the Statutes prescribe, which the Second Schedule fills in: the Chancellor from a panel of not fewer than three persons of eminence recommended by the Executive Council, and the Vice-Chancellor from the panel of the five-member committee described in the table. Statute 2 adds the removal power: the Visitor may remove a Vice-Chancellor at any time on grounds of incapacity, misconduct or violation of statutory provisions, after giving a reasonable opportunity to show cause and after consulting the Chancellor, and may suspend the Vice-Chancellor pending the inquiry. The university Visitor is thus appointer, inspector, appellate annuller and remover in one office, restrained principally by the panel system at entry and by the show cause requirement at exit.

The technology statutes give the Visitor a lighter but still substantial hand. Section 9 of the Act of 1961 makes the President the Visitor of every institute, empowers the Visitor to appoint persons to review the work and progress of an institute and to hold inquiries into its affairs, and provides that on receiving the report the Visitor may take such action and issue such directions as the Visitor considers necessary, with which the institute is bound to comply. There is no annulment power in the university form and no panel system for the Director, because the Director’s appointment runs through the Council with the Visitor’s prior approval, and the Visitor’s grip on the institute runs instead through the nomination of the Board’s Chairman and the approval of the Director. Section 9 of the Act of 2007 is to the same effect for the national institutes of technology and the science institutes, and the Director there is the Visitor’s own appointee on the recommendation of a Selection Committee the Visitor constitutes. The Visitor in the technology family is therefore less a supervisor of proceedings than a holder of the two appointments that matter, the chairman and, directly or by approval, the director.

The management statute as enacted in 2017 was the outlier, and its outlier status is the point. The Act of 2017 created no Visitor at all. The President of India had no statutory presence in the governance of an Indian Institute of Management: no appointment, no approval, no inquiry, no directions. The institutes were declared institutions of national importance by the same Parliament that had made the President the supervisor of every comparable institution, and the supervisory office was simply left out, which those who drafted and defended the Act regarded as the core of its autonomy settlement and those who amended it in 2023 regarded as its core defect. The amendment inserted the Visitor into the Act and distributed the office’s powers across the governance structure: the Chairperson of each Board is nominated by the Visitor, the Director is appointed by the Board with the Visitor’s prior approval from a panel recommended by a search-cum-selection committee on which the Visitor has a nominee, the Board may remove a Director only with the Visitor’s prior approval, the Visitor may terminate a Director’s services in the prescribed manner, and the Visitor acquired the inquiry power familiar from the older statutes, with directions binding on the institute. In six years the management model travelled the full distance between the poles of this comparison, from the one model with no Visitor to a model whose Visitor holds appointment, approval, removal and inquiry powers together. The older central universities, governed by their own Acts, sit at the university end of the scale, with Visitor provisions closely modelled on the pattern the Act of 2009 generalised, though the detail varies from Act to Act and the variation is a further reason the university model cannot be read off a single text.

The councils above the institutions

Two of the four models place a statutory council above the individual institutions, and the councils are the least discussed and most consequential difference between the technology family and the rest. The Council established by Section 31 of the Act of 1961 consists of the Minister in charge of technical education in the Central Government as ex officio Chairman, the chairman and the director of every institute, the Chairman of the University Grants Commission, the Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the heads of the Indian Institute of Science, nominees of the Central Government for the ministries concerned with technical education, finance and other subjects, a nominee of the All India Council for Technical Education, between three and five persons nominated by the Visitor for their knowledge of education, industry, science or technology, and three members of Parliament. Section 33 gives the Council the general duty of coordinating the activities of all the institutes, and then particular functions that reach deep into institutional life: advising on the duration of courses, the degrees and distinctions to be conferred, admission standards and other academic matters; laying down policy on cadres, recruitment, conditions of service, scholarships, freeships and the levying of fees; examining each institute’s development plans and approving those it considers necessary; and examining each institute’s budget estimates and recommending to the Central Government the allocation of funds. Add that the Council appoints every Director, subject to the Visitor’s approval, and nominates four members of every Board, and the picture is complete: the individual institute of technology is autonomous inside a system whose common policies, senior appointments and money are all processed through a body the Union minister chairs. The autonomy is real at the level of the campus and qualified at the level of the system, and the qualification is statutory, not administrative habit.

The Act of 2007 copies the design. Its Council, established by Section 30, is chaired ex officio by the same minister, includes the chairperson and director of every institute, the Chairman of the University Grants Commission, the Director-General of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, secretaries of the Central Government for the scientific departments, the Chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education, persons nominated by the Visitor, three members of Parliament and state government secretaries for technical education, and performs the coordinating and advisory functions for the national institutes of technology and, after the amendment of 2012, for the science education and research institutes in the Second Schedule. The central universities have no equivalent. No council sits above them; each university answers to its own Visitor, its own Court and the University Grants Commission, and the absence of a coordinating council is one reason the university sector is a collection of institutions rather than a system, with standards coordinated, so far as they are coordinated, through the Commission’s regulations rather than through a body on which the universities themselves sit. The management institutes received, in the Act of 2017, the weakest version of the institution: a Coordination Forum under Section 29, an advisory body of the institutes and nominees whose chairperson, after the amendment of 2023, is an eminent person nominated by the Visitor. A forum that advises is not a council that appoints, approves budgets and lays down fee policy, and the distance between Section 33 of the Act of 1961 and Section 29 of the Act of 2017 is the distance between system governance and institutional confederation. It is also, once again, an appointments distance: the Council matters because of what it appoints and approves, not because coordination is objectionable in itself.

The Coordination Forum of the management institutes deserves its own measure against the councils, because its weakness is deliberate and instructive. Section 29 of the Act of 2017 establishes the forum to deliberate on matters of common interest to the institutes, composed of the chairpersons and directors of the institutes with nominees of the Central Government and persons of eminence, and after the amendment of 2023 its chairperson is an eminent person nominated by the Visitor and the chairperson of each institute sits on it ex officio. It appoints no one. It approves no budget. It lays down no fee policy and advises on no degree. Its product is a common position, useful for representing the system to the government and useless for governing any part of it. The draftsmen of 2017, who had the Council of the Act of 1961 in front of them as a working model, chose a forum instead, and the choice is the councils question in its purest form: coordination among equals, which the management institutes accepted, against coordination from above, which the technology institutes received in 1961 and which was tightened, not loosened, when the second technology statute was written in 2007. The absence of a strong council is thus not an oversight in the 2017 design but one of its load-bearing decisions, and the corresponding presence in the technology design is not bureaucratic excess but the mechanism by which the system’s coherence, and its control, is maintained.

The Council’s weight is easiest to see in the decisions no single institute could take alone. When the undergraduate fees of the institutes of technology were revised across the whole system in a single decision in 2016, the revision was a system act, prepared at the level of the Council and its standing machinery and applied to every institute together, whatever any individual board’s view of its own finances. A board that wishes to move its fees outside the system’s common position discovers that the fee clause of Section 6, which appears to give the power to the institute, operates inside a policy the Council lays down under Section 33, and that the institute’s budget, from which any fee shortfall must be made good, travels to the Central Government through the Council’s examination and recommendation. None of this requires any official to telephone any director. The structure does the work silently, which is precisely how the appointment-centred design of these statutes is meant to operate: the powers that matter are exercised in advance, in the composition of bodies and the routing of papers, and the visible controversies of the sector are the residue that the structure failed to settle beforehand. The councils are therefore not an administrative appendix to the comparison of boards and Visitors. They are the comparison’s third term, and in the technology family they are, on many working days, the first.

Admissions: the second appointment system

An institution is governed twice, once through the people appointed to run it and once through the system that appoints its students, and the comparison is incomplete without the second system, because control of entry is control of the institution’s character exercised annually and at scale. Here the models divide in a pattern that confirms the main analysis and adds a wrinkle to it. The technology institutes kept their entry in institutional hands: admission to the undergraduate programmes of the institutes of technology runs through the Joint Entrance Examination (Advanced), an examination the institutes themselves conduct through a rotating organising institute under their joint admission machinery, so the system sets its own threshold and its own paper. The national institutes of technology, one tier down the same family, take their undergraduates through the Joint Entrance Examination (Main), conducted by the National Testing Agency, with seat allocation run jointly with the technology institutes’ counselling; the younger system never held its own examination. The management institutes kept theirs: the Common Admission Test is conducted by the institutes collectively, on rotation among them, and each institute then applies its own criteria and weights above the common score, which is why admission to a management institute remains partly an institutional act. The central universities moved the other way. Admission to their undergraduate programmes was placed on the Common University Entrance Test, conducted by the National Testing Agency under the framework the University Grants Commission settled in 2022, displacing the universities’ own entrance examinations and merit lists and standardising entry across the sector at a stroke.

The wrinkle is that the movement did not track the appointment analysis in the expected direction. The university model, which this article ranks highest on appointment autonomy, surrendered the entry system to a central agency without a statutory amendment, by regulatory and executive action under the standards overlay; the institute models, hedged about with councils and Visitors, retained examinations of their own because the examinations grew up inside the statutes’ institutional machinery and no equivalent overlay reached them. The lesson generalises the article’s method. Autonomy is lost and held at different layers by different instruments: what an Act of Parliament protects, a regulation may still take, and what the appointment clauses give, an admissions circular may quietly remove. A complete audit of any institution’s independence therefore runs on three columns, not one: the appointments in its Act, the standards overlay above it, and the entry system at its gate. The four models distribute those three columns differently, and the university model’s first place in the first column must be read with its third place in the third.

Money: the funding route and what follows it

All four models are funded principally by the Union, and the funding route differs in ways that track the appointment analysis. The central universities established under the Act of 2009 are funded by the Central Government, with grants channelled through the University Grants Commission; the Commission’s Act adds the gatekeeping that the university article in this cluster examines, under which a university established after the amendment of 1972 may receive central grants only if the Commission has declared it fit to receive them, and the Commission may withhold grants from a university that fails within a reasonable time to comply with its recommendations. The university’s money therefore arrives through a regulator, and the regulator’s standards jurisdiction and the funder’s chequebook are held in the same hands, which is the funding expression of the standards power in Entry 66. The technology statutes fund the institutes directly: the Act of 1961 provides for grants by the Central Government to each institute, paid into the institute’s fund and applied under the Act’s accounts provisions, with the Council examining budget estimates and recommending allocations, so the money route runs through the system body the minister chairs rather than through an independent commission. The Act of 2007 follows the same pattern for the national institutes. The management institutes draw central grants as well, but the Act of 2017 left the Board in control of the institute’s finances to a degree the older statutes did not, including the specification of fees by the Board’s own regulations; the institutes’ greater fee income from executive education and their endowments soften the dependence that the grant route would otherwise impose, which is a material fact about autonomy that no reading of appointment clauses should omit. An institution that can fund a third of its budget from its own charges experiences a government nominee on its board differently from an institution that cannot pay its salaries without the next instalment of grant.

Two disciplines apply across all four models and limit what funding dependence can lawfully do. The first is audit: each Act requires annual accounts, and the accounts of these institutions are audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India, so public money carries public audit whatever the governance model, a point the defenders of the 2023 amendment pressed and its critics did not seriously contest. The second is that grant conditions operate at the level of the grant. A government dissatisfied with an institute it funds can squeeze a budget through the ordinary appropriation process, and governments of every complexion have done so across the sector; what it cannot do, without amending the statute, is convert the funding relationship into a power to direct academic decisions, because no Act in this comparison confers a general direction power over teaching and research on the funding government. The Visitor’s direction powers, where they exist, arise from inquiry and report, not from the chequebook. The funding route therefore disciplines autonomy at the margins, through quantum and through audit, while the appointment clauses govern it at the centre. Readers deciding how much weight to give the money should hold both halves of that sentence.

One further control travels with the money in the technology family and is easy to miss, because it sits in the powers clause rather than the finance chapter. Under Section 6 of the Act of 2007, a national institute may institute academic and other posts only with the prior approval of the Central Government, the Director alone excepted from the approval because the Director is appointed through the Visitor’s own chain. The Act of 1961 contains the parallel design in its own powers clause, under which the institute appoints to the posts it institutes, the Director again excepted. A power to create posts is a power to grow, to enter new fields and to commit future budgets, and a statute that reserves its prior approval to the funding government has kept a hand on the institution’s expansion without touching a single academic decision. The management Act distributed the equivalent power differently again: the Board creates posts and appoints to them, while the proviso to the Board’s powers in Section 11 reserves the cadre, pay scales, allowances and terms of employment of those posts to determination by the Central Government. Read together, the three clauses show the draftsman’s real menu. Approval of creation, determination of cadre and pay, or institutional freedom within a budget: each statute picks its point of financial control, and the pick is as revealing of the settlement as any clause about the board.

How hard is each statute to change?

The last dimension of the comparison is rigidity: how much of each settlement is locked in primary legislation, and how much the participants can rewrite themselves. At the top level the four models are equal, and equally exposed. Board composition, the head’s appointment, the Visitor’s powers and the councils’ functions are in the Acts, and only Parliament can move them, as Parliament did in 2023. The practical politics of amendment are another matter, and here the family’s history is uniform: these Acts are amended often, to add institutions, as the technology Act was amended to absorb the Banaras engineering college in 2012 and the Indian School of Mines in 2016 and to plant new institutes across two decades, and as the Act of 2009 has been amended to insert one university after another into its scheme, including the special provisions for Jammu and Kashmir and Bihar and the new universities of Andhra Pradesh. Amendment for expansion is uncontroversial and constant; amendment for governance is rare and contested; but the text offers no distinction between the two, and a governance settlement in an ordinary Act enjoys no entrenchment beyond the political cost of revisiting it. Any comparison that treats a statutory autonomy settlement as a permanent fact has mistaken a majority for a guarantee.

Below the Act, the models diverge in a way that rewards attention, because the level at which detail sits determines who can alter the institution’s working constitution without returning to Parliament. In the university model, the first Statutes of a university under the Act of 2009 are not made by the university at all: they are set out in the Second Schedule to the Act itself, so the founding governance code, including the Statutes on the Chancellor and the vice chancellor, is primary legislation, and subsequent Statutes are made by the Executive Council through the process the Act prescribes in Sections 26 and 27, with the Visitor in the chain. The institute statutes place their Statutes one level down, made under the Act by the bodies it designates, with the first Statutes of an institute of technology framed at the level of the Council. The management Act goes one level further down and changes the instrument: the working detail of an institute’s governance sits in regulations made by its own Board under Section 35 of the Act, within rules made by the Central Government under Section 34, so a board can rewrite much of its own procedure by its own act. The gradient is exact, and it runs opposite to the gradient of the appointment powers as enacted in 2017. The model that trusted its board with the appointments also trusted it with the rulebook; the model that hedged its head’s appointment with a panel also froze the founding rules into a Schedule of the Act. Rigidity and autonomy, in this family, are the same decision taken twice.

What the declaration changes on the ground

Since the seeded questions in this cluster press the point, it is worth collecting what the declaration of national importance does and does not do in the daily life of an institution, beyond the competence point already made. It does not set the institution’s fees, choose its students or appoint its staff; those live in the operative provisions and in policy made under them. It does not exempt the institution from the general law of the sector: the central educational institutions legislation on reservation in admissions, enacted after the Constitution (Ninety-third Amendment) Act, 2005, applies to these institutions as central institutions, and the reservation in admission upheld by the Supreme Court in the Ashoka Kumar Thakur case in 2008 was applied to the technology and management institutes precisely because they are central institutions maintained by the state. It does not remove the institution from transparency law: these bodies are public authorities for the purposes of the information legislation, answerable for their records like other public bodies, and their officers hold public office for the purposes that follow. What the declaration does is threefold. It places the institution in the Union’s legislative and financial charge, so that its fortunes are debated in Parliament and carried in the Union budget rather than in a state assembly. It signals, to students, faculty and employers, a national catchment and a national standard, a signal whose market value is real even though no clause creates it. And it makes the institution’s governance a subject of national legislation, which is the double edge this whole comparison has examined: the same parliamentary attention that guarantees the institution’s funding and standing guarantees also that its appointment clauses can be rewritten by a national majority with a grievance, as the management institutes learned. Status, in this family of law, is not a shield held against the state. It is the legal form of the institution’s relationship with the state, and the relationship has two parties.

How the models were made: a loosening line, then a reversal

Read in sequence, the statutes tell a story with a twist. The Act of 1961 was written for institutions the state was creating almost from nothing, on the recommendation of the committee chaired by Nalini Ranjan Sarkar in the nineteen forties, which had proposed higher technical institutions on the model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A founding state kept the appointments: the Visitor nominates the chairman, the minister-chaired Council appoints the director and frames common policy, and the institute governs its campus inside that frame. The settlement was not experienced as oppression by its beneficiaries, because the counterfactual was the ordinary government college, against which a statutory board, a statutory fund and a Senate were liberation. The university statutes of the same era, and the general template the Act of 2009 later standardised, placed the Visitor at the apex and the panel between the Visitor and the vice chancellorship, a design inherited from the older central university Acts and ultimately from the colonial university Acts of 1916 and 1920 and their successors. The Act of 2007, for the regional engineering colleges converted into national institutes, tightened the governmental share of the board beyond the 1961 proportions, which already complicates any simple story of steady liberalisation: the second technology statute trusted its institutions less, on paper, than the first.

The management institutes break the sequence, and the break is the historical heart of the comparison. The first management institutes were founded in 1961, the year of the technology Act, but they were not founded by statute. They were registered as societies under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, a form chosen for flexibility, under which the institute was governed by a board or society in which the Central Government, the state government, industry and the faculty all had places, and the government’s financial support flowed as grants to a private-law body. The society form carried the institutes for over half a century. It also carried the disability examined in the degrees section: a society is not a university and is not specially empowered by an Act of Parliament, so its students took diplomas. Periodic proposals to give the institutes a statute surfaced and subsided, resisted from within the system by those who valued the informality of the society form and feared that a statute would become a cage.

Why were the management institutes governed without a statute for so long?

Because the society form worked for the purposes its founders valued. Registration under the Societies Registration Act, 1860 gave each institute a governing body, capacity to hold property, charge fees and appoint faculty outside government service rules, and no one able to change it had reason to disturb it until the degree question made the disability impossible to ignore.

When the statute finally came in 2017, it therefore had to do two opposite things at once. It was a grant, of degree power, of statutory personality and of the declaration of national importance. It was also a first imposition, of statutory governance on bodies that had run themselves under their own memoranda for decades, and the draftsmen resolved the tension by writing a governance chapter that reproduced, inside the statute, the self-governing character of the society it replaced: a board that appoints its own chairperson, fills its own vacancies from eminence, faculty and alumni, constitutes its own search committee and appoints its own director, with the two governments present as single nominees on a board of up to nineteen. The Act of 2017 is best understood not as the state retreating but as the state transcribing an existing private settlement into public law, which is also why its autonomy was always more fragile than it looked. A settlement that exists by transcription can be revised by the transcriber, and what Parliament had enacted in an afternoon’s consensus it could amend the moment the political valuation of the settlement changed. The company law cluster of this series found the same principle from the other side, in the way the Companies Act governs conduct by legislating who sits in the room through independent directors, committees and composition rules; higher education is governed by the same technique, and the technique has a direction, since the legislature that composes the room can recompose it.

Two episodes inside the sequence sharpen the point. The technology Act of 1961 was itself a consolidation: the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur had been incorporated under its own Act of 1956, and the Act of 1961 repealed that statute while continuing its essential provisions in a Schedule, folding the single-institution settlement into the multi-institution template. The move from one Act per institution to one Act per family, which the university sector has never completed, was thus accomplished for the technology institutes at the very beginning, and it mattered for everything that followed, because a family Act creates the need for the coordinating council and the common appointment chain that a set of individual Acts does not. The Act of 2009 displays the opposite technique under pressure of time: the twelve new universities were first established by ordinance, and the Act, assented to in March 2009, was deemed to have come into force on 15 January 2009, the ordinance’s date, so the institutions’ legal existence runs from an executive instrument that Parliament later adopted. Neither episode is a scandal; both are reminders that the founding instruments of this sector were written by a state in a hurry, and that the appointment clauses they contain were often settled faster, and with less argument, than the clauses Parliament debated. The sector’s autonomy argument is conducted, to a degree its participants seldom acknowledge, over the unexamined defaults of hurried draftsmen.

The reversal of 2023

The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2023, Act 23 of 2023, is the most instructive amendment in the modern history of Indian institutional design, and this article summarises it because the comparison cannot be closed without it, while the full treatment, including the parliamentary debate and the institutes’ response, belongs to the article on the IIM Act and institutional autonomy. The amendment designated the President of India as Visitor of every institute under the Act. It provided that the Chairperson of each Board of Governors be nominated by the Visitor in place of appointment by the Board. It amended Section 16 so that the Director is appointed by the Board with the prior approval of the Visitor, on the recommendation of a search-cum-selection committee composed of the Chairperson, one nominee of the Visitor and two members drawn from eminent administrators, industrialists, educationists, scientists, technocrats and management specialists, with the procedure for selection prescribed by the Central Government. It required the Visitor’s prior approval for the Board to remove a Director, and empowered the Visitor to terminate a Director’s services in the prescribed manner. It gave the Visitor the power to cause inquiries into an institute’s affairs and to issue directions binding on the institute on the strength of the inquiry report. It adjusted the Coordination Forum so that its chairperson is an eminent person nominated by the Visitor. And in the same statute it converted the National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai into the Indian Institute of Management, Mumbai, extending the amended model to the institute least consulted about receiving it.

The government’s case for the amendment was made in Parliament by the Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, who told the House that the Centre had no intention of usurping the academic accountability of the institutes and that the object was to secure their management accountability: publicly funded institutions of national importance, spending public money and charging public fees, could not be answerable for their administration to a board accountable only to itself. The case against, made by opposition members in the debate and by voices from within the institute system, was that accountability language was doing the work of control: that a Visitor who nominates the chairperson, approves and can terminate the director, sits on the search committee by nominee and can direct the institute after an inquiry of the Visitor’s own ordering holds every lever that the comparison in this article has identified as decisive, and that an institute so held is autonomous in the sense in which a department is autonomous between directions. Both cases are stated here at the strength their makers gave them because the stance of this series requires it, and the verdict section below says which the statutory evidence supports. What no participant in the debate disputed is the premise this article began with: that the amendment was worth fighting over precisely because appointments are where autonomy lives. Nobody proposed to amend the degree clause, the objects clause or the academic council provisions, because nobody on either side believed those clauses were where the power was.

What the courts police, and what they leave alone

The judicial contribution to this comparison is narrower than the academic debate suggests, and its narrowness is itself a finding. Courts do not review the wisdom of an appointment model; they review the legality of appointments made under it. The Visitor’s decisions, like those of a Chancellor in the state system, are amenable to judicial review on the ordinary grounds of illegality, procedural impropriety and mala fides, and a Visitor who appoints outside the statutory panel or without the prescribed consultation acts beyond the statute and will be corrected. The sharpest line of authority concerns the point where the appointment statutes meet the University Grants Commission’s regulations. In Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi v. State of Gujarat, decided on 3 March 2022, the Supreme Court quashed the appointment of a vice chancellor of Sardar Patel University because the search committee had not recommended a panel as the University Grants Commission Regulations of 2018 required, holding the state law repugnant to the regulations to that extent and the appointment void from the beginning. In Professor (Dr) Sreejith P.S. v. Dr. Rajasree M.S., decided on 21 October 2022, the Court applied the same reasoning to the vice chancellor of the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technological University, whose search committee had recommended a single name, and held that the regulations form part of the scheme of the parliamentary statute and prevail over a conflicting state Act whether or not the state has separately adopted them. Those were state university cases, and the chancellor dimension of that system belongs to another article of this cluster; their significance here is the general proposition that the panel is not a formality. Where a statute or a regulation prescribes the composition of the body that recommends, an appointment made on the recommendation of a differently composed body is not an irregular appointment but no appointment in law at all.

The reasoning has its critics, and the strongest statement of the criticism is the editorial published in The Hindu on 17 November 2022 under the title that this unseating of vice chancellors is faulty. The editorial objection is doctrinal: repugnancy under Article 254 of the Constitution is a doctrine about the relation between a law made by Parliament and a law made by a state legislature, and regulations made by a commission under a statute are not, without more, a law made by Parliament, so that elevating the regulations above a state Act by the repugnancy route stretches the doctrine beyond its text. The objection deserves its place because it identifies the real stakes. If the appointment process for the head of every university in India is governed, in the last analysis, by a regulation that a commission can amend, then the locus of appointment power has shifted again, from legislatures to a regulator, and the analysis of this article applies to the shift: follow the appointments, and ask who makes the rule that makes them. For the central institutions in this comparison the position is simpler, because their appointment rules sit in Acts of Parliament and in Statutes made under them, and the courts’ role is the confined one of keeping the Visitor, the councils and the boards inside the four corners of texts they did not write. Judicial review polices the boundary of the statute. It does not redistribute the power the statute allocates, which is why the argument about autonomy is won and lost in legislatures and not in courtrooms.

One further judicial proposition completes the picture, concerning the Visitor’s own decisions rather than the panels beneath them. A court asked to undo a Visitor’s appointment or direction does not ask whether it would have chosen differently among the names on a panel, or whether the direction was wise; it asks whether the Visitor acted within the statute, followed the procedure the statute prescribes, took the consultations the statute requires and kept extraneous considerations out. An appointment of the panel’s candidate by a Visitor who has followed the Act is, for practical purposes, unassailable, while an appointment that skips a statutory step fails however eminent the appointee. The discipline is symmetrical and it explains a feature of the sector that outsiders find puzzling: litigation about these institutions is almost always litigation about process, about committees wrongly composed, notices not given, panels not formed, approvals not obtained, and almost never about the merits of any candidate. Process is where the statutes put the power, and so process is where the courts can reach. The administrator who understands this holds the practical key to the whole comparison: in Indian institutional law, the procedure is not the servant of the appointment. The procedure is the appointment, wearing its legal dress.

The verdict: autonomy is an appointments question

The evidence assembled permits a defended answer to the question the brief sets, which statute gives an Indian public institution the most autonomy. On the texts as they stand after the amendment of 2023, the answer is the central university model, and the answer is less comfortable than it sounds. The university model leaves the governing council substantially in the institution’s own hands, lodges academic authority in an Academic Council with no general board review above it, has no minister-chaired council above the institution approving budgets and laying down fee policy, and takes the Visitor’s undoubted supremacy at the point of appointment and disciplines it with a panel the university’s own Executive Council mostly builds, a show cause requirement before removal, and a Chancellor interposed between the Visitor and the institution as a consultative presence. The technology models disperse appointment power so widely that no single holder owns an institute, yet they place the director’s appointment, the board’s chairmanship, the board’s largest nomination bloc, the budget recommendation and the common fee and cadre policy in the hands of the Visitor, the governments and a council the minister chairs; theirs is a negotiated autonomy inside a system, genuine on the campus and derivative above it. The management model as enacted in 2017 was, on the texts, the most autonomous of the four by a distance, and it held that position for six years. As amended in 2023 it falls behind the university model on the decisive dimensions, because its Visitor holds the chairmanship nomination, the prior approval of appointment, a nominee on the search committee, the prior approval of removal, a personal power of termination and the inquiry and direction power together, a combination no other model concentrates in one office. The deciding factor, to name it as the framework requires, is not the declaration of national importance, not the degree clause, not the objects clause and not the presence or absence of a council; it is the distribution of the appointment of the head and of the chairperson of the governing body, and on that factor the ranking of the models reversed in a single amendment without a syllable of their academic provisions being touched.

The qualification owed in the other direction must be given its full weight, because the 2017 model carried a genuine and unanswered defect. A board that fills seventeen of its nineteen seats by its own nomination and co-option, appoints its own chairperson, and appoints and removes its own director is accountable, in the end, to itself. Public money audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General answers the financial half of the objection, and the institutes’ record of self-government answers part of the practical half, but neither answers the constitutional half: an institution created by Parliament, funded by Parliament and declared by Parliament to be of national importance had no external appointment check of any kind, and the first serious failure of such a board, a captured board, a board that appointed a director for reasons no one could examine, would have produced exactly the amendment that arrived without the failure. The defenders of the 2017 settlement rarely engaged this objection, and their silence weakened a case that was otherwise strong. Equally, the objection proves too much if it is allowed to run without limit. Appointment power in the hands of a government is not accountability merely because the government is elected. A Visitor’s nominee as chairperson, a government-prescribed selection procedure and a minister-chaired council are instruments that a government with a view about what should be taught, and by whom, can use as readily as a government concerned only with clean administration, and the statutes provide no internal test that distinguishes the two uses. Accountability answers the question, to whom must the institution explain itself. Control answers a different question, whose preferences the institution must anticipate. The appointment clauses decide which of the two a given settlement delivers, and they decide it silently, years before any controversy makes the answer visible.

Is a board that appoints itself accountable to anyone?

Formally, to its auditors and to Parliament’s power to amend its statute, and to no one else in the chain of its own appointments. That was the settlement of 2017: financial accountability without appointment accountability, which its defenders called autonomy and its critics a closed shop, and on which both sides were describing the same clauses accurately.

The honest conclusion of the comparison is that Indian law has not yet occupied the middle ground that the debate keeps circling. No statute in this family entrusts appointments to an independent commission insulated from both the government and the institution, chosen by a public process for a fixed term and forbidden reappointment. No statute builds a governing board with a majority of external members appointed through open advertisement and selection by a body the institution and the government each only partly control. The four models distribute the same power among the same three holders, the Visitor, a council or the board itself, in different proportions, and the history of the family is an oscillation between two of the three: board self-selection in 2017, governmental appointment before and after, with the proportions adjusted and the middle unexplored. A reformer who accepts this article’s thesis knows where to work. Leave the academic clauses alone, since they are already adequate and already similar. Write the appointment clauses as if they were the whole statute, because in every sense that survives contact with a determined government, they are.

The verdict carries limits, and the framework requires them stated. It does not hold for the institution in its founding years, whatever its statute: a new institute with no endowment, no alumni in office and a campus still being built depends on the ministry for capital releases and approvals in a way no appointment clause can offset, and several of the institutions created in the expansion after 2008 lived that dependence under statutes of every model. It does not hold where the internal life of the institution is itself the problem: a Senate divided against its director, or a board captured by a faction of the faculty, will experience the most liberal appointment clauses as an absence of rescue, and the Visitor’s inquiry power, which the verdict counts as control, reads in that situation as the only available remedy. It does not hold across the boundary of this comparison, in the state university system, where the Chancellor’s office and the regulations overlay produce a different distribution again, examined elsewhere in this cluster. And it is a verdict about law, not about outcomes: the correlation between liberal appointment clauses and institutional excellence is asserted by every party to the debate and demonstrated by none, since the institutes that flourished under the society form also flourished under selection systems, endowments and labour markets that the statutes did not create. What the comparison establishes is narrower and, for a legislator, more useful: that the appointment clauses are the mechanism by which every other influence on an institution is transmitted, so that a Parliament dissatisfied with the sector’s governance should amend those clauses, as it did in 2023, and a Parliament satisfied with them should expect every other reform it enacts to be filtered through the people the clauses appoint.

There is a general feature of Indian institutional design here, and the series has met it in two unrelated fields, which is reason enough to name it as one. The company law cluster found that the Act of 2013 governs the conduct of companies less by prohibiting outcomes than by composing the rooms in which outcomes are decided: independent directors in stated proportions, committees of stated composition, auditors appointed and rotated by stated machinery, so that the legislature’s real instructions are addressed to the membership of bodies rather than to the merits of decisions. The higher education cluster finds the identical technique in the institution statutes, where the operative clauses compose boards, councils, search committees and Senates and the declaratory clauses speak of excellence and freedom. Two fields with nothing in common, corporate capital and public universities, are governed by the same drafting instinct, and the instinct extends across the statute book, to the commissions, authorities and tribunals that populate Indian public law, whose constitutions are invariably appointment clauses wrapped in an objects clause. The practical corollary for any reader of Indian legislation is a reading rule of general application. When a new institutional statute is enacted, the objects clause will tell you what the legislature wanted to be thought of it, the offences and penalties will tell you what it feared, and the appointment clauses will tell you what it did. Read them in that order of increasing honesty, and the statute will rarely surprise you afterwards.

Reading the comparison by reader

For the academic or administrator measuring a home institution, the operative exercise is the table: find the column, read down the rows, and count how many of the four offices are filled from inside the institution and how many arrive from the Visitor, the governments or a council. That count, and not the institution’s self-description, is its autonomy position, and it can be done for any public institution in the country from its own Act in an afternoon; the working file it produces, a marked Act, a board count and the notes of where each appointment originates, is a sensitive governance record of exactly the kind that the practice described in how journalists use VaultBook to protect sources is built to keep private. For the policy reader, the transferable finding is the one the company law cluster reached independently: Indian institutional design governs by composition, and the composition clauses of a statute predict its behaviour better than its objects clause, its preamble or its minister’s speeches at enactment. For the aspirant, the examinable core is compact: the declaration of national importance as a parliamentary act under the Union List, the third route of Section 22 of the University Grants Commission Act by which institute degrees are lawful, the Visitor as the common hinge of the central system, and the amendment of 2023 as the standing illustration that autonomy settlements are revised through appointments; the cluster’s study treatment assembles these in examination form in the education laws study guide. A reader pursuing a live appointment dispute, a service grievance or a challenge to a proceeding under any of these Acts needs advice on the facts of that matter from a qualified practitioner, since the general positions stated here describe the statutes and not the outcome of any individual case.

The four statutes will be amended again, because they always are, and the amendments will be reported as technical adjustments to boards, councils and committees. This comparison’s closing advice is to read every such amendment the way the amendment of 2023 taught the sector to read it: ignore the recitals, find the appointment clauses, and count the links of the chain that moved. Whoever holds the appointments holds the institution, whatever the objects clause says, and the statute that grants freedom in its declarations and retains appointments in its operative part has granted the appearance of autonomy and kept the substance of control.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do the Central Universities, IIT and IIM Acts differ?

The three Acts confer the same degree power and protect academic decisions in similar language, and they differ chiefly in their appointment machinery. Under the Central Universities Act, 2009 the Visitor appoints the vice chancellor from a panel built mostly by the university’s Executive Council, and the Council is drawn largely from inside the university. Under the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 the Visitor nominates the board chairman, a council chaired by the Union minister appoints the director with the Visitor’s approval, and the board is assembled from governmental and council nominations. Under the Indian Institutes of Management Act, 2017 the board originally appointed its own chairperson and director, until the amendment of 2023 moved both toward the Visitor.

Q: Who appoints the head of a central university, an IIT and an IIM?

The Visitor, the President of India, appoints the vice chancellor of a central university, choosing from a panel recommended by a committee of five persons, three nominated by the Executive Council and two by the Visitor, under Statute 2 of the Second Schedule to the Central Universities Act, 2009. The director of an Indian Institute of Technology is appointed by the Council of the institutes, with the prior approval of the Visitor, under Section 17 of the Act of 1961. The director of an Indian Institute of Management is appointed by the institute’s Board of Governors, which under the Act of 2017 needed no one’s approval, and which since the amendment of 2023 must obtain the prior approval of the Visitor.

Q: What does declaring an institution of national importance actually do?

Less than is commonly assumed. The declaration, made by Parliament by law under Entries 63 and 64 of the Union List, marks the institution as one of national rather than regional concern and settles legislative competence in Parliament’s hands. It confers no powers by itself. The institution’s degree-granting power, its governing board, its funding and its autonomy all come from the operative provisions of the Act that contains the declaration, and those provisions differ widely between statutes carrying the identical declaration. An institution of national importance may be tightly held by a minister-chaired council or, as the management institutes were between 2018 and 2023, governed by a self-appointing board. The label is constant; the settlement beneath it is not.

Q: Which central institutions can award their own degrees?

Every institution governed by the four statutes in this comparison. A central university awards degrees under Section 6 of the Central Universities Act, 2009. An Indian Institute of Technology awards them under Section 6 of the Act of 1961, and a National Institute of Technology or an Indian Institute of Science Education and Research under Section 6 of the Act of 2007. An Indian Institute of Management awards degrees under Section 7 of the Act of 2017, a power it lacked throughout its decades as a registered society, when its students received diplomas. In each case the legal route is the third limb of Section 22 of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956: an institution specially empowered by an Act of Parliament.

Q: How is the governing body composed in a central university, an IIT and an IIM?

A central university is governed by an Executive Council chaired by the vice chancellor and built principally from the university’s own officers, deans and teachers, with a limited number of external members under its Statutes. The board of an Indian Institute of Technology, under Section 11 of the Act of 1961, consists of a chairman nominated by the Visitor, the director, one nominee of each state government in the institute’s zone, four nominees of the Council and two professors nominated by the Senate. The board of an Indian Institute of Management, under Section 10 of the Act of 2017, has up to nineteen members, of whom only two are government nominees, the rest being filled by the board’s own nominations and co-options.

Q: Which central institution statute gives the most autonomy?

Measured by the appointment provisions, which are where autonomy is decided, the central university model gives the most in the law as it stands after 2023. Its governing council is substantially the institution’s own, no minister-chaired council sits above it approving budgets and fee policy, and the Visitor’s appointment of the vice chancellor is disciplined by a panel the Executive Council mostly builds. Between the commencement of the Indian Institutes of Management Act in 2018 and its amendment in 2023, the management model gave the most by a wide margin, because its board appointed its own chairperson and director. The amendment of 2023 reversed that ranking by moving the chairmanship, the director’s approval and a power of termination to the Visitor.

Q: Do these central institutions come under the UGC?

In part, and the part matters. The University Grants Commission’s standards jurisdiction, founded on Entry 66 of the Union List and exercised through Section 12 of its Act of 1956 and the regulations made under Section 26, reaches the central universities directly, and the Commission is also the channel through which their central grants flow, with power to declare a university fit for grants and to withhold them. The institutes of technology, the national institutes of technology and the management institutes are not funded through the Commission and are not governed by it; their degrees are lawful because their own Acts specially empower them under Section 22. But the Commission’s degree specifications and standards framework still frame the qualifications they award, and its chairman sits ex officio on the technology councils.

Q: Can a state create an institution of national importance?

No. The declaration of an institution of national importance is an act of Parliament, resting on Entry 64 of the Union List for institutions for scientific or technical education financed by the Government of India, and on Entry 63 for the institutions it names. A state legislature may establish a university or an institute of excellence under its own powers, and several states have created institutions of high standing, but it cannot confer the status of institution of national importance, cannot place an institution inside the central funding and council system, and cannot give its institution the degree route that Section 22 of the University Grants Commission Act reserves to institutions empowered by an Act of Parliament. The status is Parliament’s alone to give.

Q: What did the IIM Amendment Act of 2023 change about who controls an IIM?

The Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Act, 2023, Act 23 of 2023, inserted the President of India into the Act as Visitor of every institute, an office the Act of 2017 had omitted entirely. The chairperson of each Board of Governors is nominated by the Visitor instead of being appointed by the Board. The Director is appointed by the Board only with the Visitor’s prior approval, from a panel recommended by a search-cum-selection committee that includes a nominee of the Visitor, following a procedure prescribed by the Central Government. The Board needs the Visitor’s prior approval to remove a Director, the Visitor may terminate a Director’s services directly, and the Visitor may order inquiries and issue directions binding on the institute.

Q: Who chairs the Council of IITs and what does the Council do?

The Minister in charge of technical education in the Central Government chairs the Council ex officio, under Section 31 of the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961. The Council is the system body above the individual institutes: its members include the chairman and director of every institute, the Chairman of the University Grants Commission, members of Parliament and nominees of the Central Government and the Visitor. Under Section 33 it coordinates the institutes’ activities, advises on courses, degrees and admission standards, lays down policy on cadres, recruitment, conditions of service and the levying of fees, examines development plans and budget estimates, and recommends the allocation of funds to the Central Government. It also appoints every director, subject to the Visitor’s approval, and nominates four members of every board.

Q: What can the Visitor do inside a central university or an IIT?

In a central university, a great deal. Under Section 8 of the Central Universities Act, 2009 the Visitor may order an inspection or an inquiry into the university’s teaching, research, administration or finances, address advice to the vice chancellor on the findings, issue directions the Executive Council must obey if it fails to act satisfactorily, and annul any proceeding of the university that does not conform to the Act, the Statutes or the Ordinances, after hearing the Registrar. The Visitor also appoints the Chancellor and the vice chancellor and may remove the vice chancellor for incapacity, misconduct or violation of statutory provisions after a show cause opportunity. In an institute of technology the Visitor’s express powers are narrower: to order a review or inquiry and to issue binding directions on the report, alongside nominating the board chairman and approving the director.

Q: How are central universities, IITs, NITs and IIMs funded, and what follows the money?

All four are funded principally by the Union government, but the money travels by different roads. Central universities receive their grants through the University Grants Commission, which may declare a university fit or unfit for central grants and withhold them from a university that ignores its recommendations. The institutes of technology and the national institutes of technology are funded directly under their own Acts, with their council examining budgets and recommending allocations to the Central Government. The management institutes receive central grants under their Act while raising substantial fee and executive education income of their own. Everywhere, the accounts are audited by the Comptroller and Auditor-General of India. What follows the money is audit and budget discipline; no Act converts the funding relationship into a power to direct teaching or research.

Q: Why were the IIMs run as registered societies for so long?

Because the form suited everyone with power to change it. The first management institutes were founded in 1961 as societies registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1860, which gave each institute a governing body mixing government, industry and faculty, the capacity to hold property and charge fees, and freedom from the service rules and procedural codes that govern statutory bodies. Governments obtained influence without statutory responsibility; the institutes obtained public money without public law; and the arrangement’s one hard disability, the inability to confer degrees, was softened for decades by administrative recognition of the diploma for employment and further study. Only when the demand for degree status became irresistible did Parliament legislate, in 2017, transcribing the self-governing society settlement into statutory form.

Q: What is the difference between a Senate and an Academic Council in these statutes?

The names mark the two families of the comparison. The technology statutes, the Acts of 1961 and 2007, call the academic authority a Senate: in an institute of technology it consists of the director as chairman, the deputy director, all the professors of the institute and three external educationists, and Section 15 of the Act of 1961 charges it with the control and general regulation of standards of instruction, education and examination, subject to the Board of Governors’ power to review its acts. The university and management statutes call the corresponding body an Academic Council: under Section 22 of the Central Universities Act, 2009 it is the university’s academic authority, chaired by the vice chancellor, and in a management institute it determines academic content, admission criteria and examination guidelines. Function first, name second: both bodies hold the academic jurisdiction.

Q: Can the government remove a vice chancellor or an institute director?

Not directly, and the distinction is the design. A central university’s vice chancellor is removed by the Visitor, under Statute 2 of the Second Schedule to the Act of 2009, on grounds of incapacity, misconduct or violation of statutory provisions, after a reasonable opportunity to show cause and after consulting the Chancellor; the Visitor may also suspend the vice chancellor pending inquiry. The Union government as such has no removal power, though the Visitor acts on ministerial advice, which is why the statutory grounds and the hearing matter. A director of a management institute is removed by the Board, which since the amendment of 2023 requires the Visitor’s prior approval, and the Visitor may terminate the director’s services directly in the prescribed manner. Directors of the technology institutes hold office under their Acts and Statutes within the appointment chains of their councils and the Visitor.

Q: Why do the older central universities have their own separate Acts?

Because each was created in its own era by its own statute, and Parliament has never consolidated them. Banaras Hindu University rests on its Act of 1915, Aligarh Muslim University on its Act of 1920, the University of Delhi on its Act of 1922, Jawaharlal Nehru University on its Act of 1966 and the University of Hyderabad on its Act of 1974. The Central Universities Act, 2009 was written for the expansion of that year, twelve new universities and three converted state universities, and it standardised the template for them rather than rewriting the older foundations, whose Acts carry their own Visitor, Chancellor and appointment provisions in broadly similar but not identical terms. The practical consequence is that the central university sector has no single governance text: the position of a particular university is found in its own Act.

Q: What happens when a vice chancellor appointment breaks the UGC Regulations?

The appointment is void from the beginning, and the courts will remove the appointee. In Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi v. State of Gujarat, decided in March 2022, the Supreme Court quashed the appointment of the vice chancellor of Sardar Patel University because the search committee had failed to recommend the panel the University Grants Commission Regulations of 2018 require. In Professor (Dr) Sreejith P.S. v. Dr. Rajasree M.S., decided in October 2022, the Court reached the same result where a search committee had recommended a single name, holding that the regulations prevail over a conflicting state Act. Both were state university cases, but the principle governs appointment practice generally: a panel formed otherwise than the governing rules prescribe is not an irregularity to be excused but a defect that destroys the appointment.

Q: Do state governments have any role in these central institutions?

Yes, a designed and limited one. On the board of an institute of technology, the government of each state in the institute’s zone nominates one member, chosen from technologists or industrialists of repute. On the board of a national institute of technology, the host state government nominates two members, and state technical education secretaries sit on the Council. On the board of a management institute, the state government in whose territory the institute sits has one nominee among up to nineteen. State governments have no corresponding seat in the governance of a central university under the Act of 2009, though the university sits in their territory and serves their students. The pattern is consistent: states are present where the institution was conceived as serving a region, and absent where it was conceived as a national foundation.

Q: Who decides fees and admission standards in an IIT, an NIT and an IIM?

Different bodies, which is the comparison in miniature. In the technology system the Council lays down policy on the levying of fees and advises on admission standards for all the institutes together, under Section 33 of the Act of 1961 and the corresponding provisions of the Act of 2007, and the individual board acts within that policy. In a management institute the Board itself specifies the fees for its courses by its own regulations, under Section 11 of the Act of 2017, and its Academic Council determines the criteria and process for admissions. The technology model therefore treats fees and admissions as system questions settled above the institution, while the management model treats them as institutional questions settled by the board, one more measure of the distance between the two settlements.

Q: Does changing the governance of these institutions require an Act of Parliament?

For everything that matters in this comparison, yes. The composition of the boards, the appointment of the head and the chairperson, the powers of the Visitor and the existence and functions of the councils are all written into the Acts themselves, so no government order, rule or regulation can move them; the amendment of 2023 required a Bill, a debate and an Act, Act 23 of 2023, to transfer the management institutes’ chairmanship and the approval of their directors to the Visitor. Below that level the statutes delegate: institutes make Statutes, Ordinances and, in the management model, regulations by their boards, and the Central Government makes rules under each Act. The delegation explains the texture of the system. Parliament keeps the appointments; the institutions keep the detail; and a reader who wants to know whether a reported reform is real should ask which of the two levels it operates on.