Education on the Concurrent List is the single most consequential placement in the Seventh Schedule, because it decides who may govern the institutions through which almost every Indian family passes. When a state government and the Union government disagree about a vice chancellor, an entrance test, a language formula or a textbook, the quarrel is rarely about education in the abstract. It is a quarrel about a boundary written into the constitutional text: the boundary between setting standards, which the Constitution reserves to the Union in terms, and administering institutions, which the states insist never left their hands. Every dispute in this field is, at bottom, an argument about which side of that boundary a contested decision sits on, and the argument cannot be settled by pointing to the year 1976 alone.

The familiar story is that education was a state subject until the Emergency, when the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976 moved it to the Concurrent List, and that centralisation followed from that move. The familiar story is wrong in the way that matters. The transfer of 1976 changed who could legislate on education generally, and it mattered a great deal for school education, for teacher training and for the volume of central legislation that followed. But the deepest centralising instrument in Indian education was never the transfer. It is an entry that has sat in the Union List since 1950, untouched by the Forty-second Amendment and older than the transfer by a generation: Entry 66 of List I, which gives Parliament exclusive power over the co-ordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions. Every central regulator that the states complain about, the University Grants Commission, the technical education council, the teacher education council and the medical commission, draws its authority from that entry or from the concurrent power read with it, and the states lost the decisive argument not in 1976 but on each occasion when a court accepted that a contested matter was a standard rather than an act of administration.

This article reads the constitutional position the way the disputes require it to be read. It sets out the entries themselves, in their own words, because paraphrase is where the errors in this field begin. It traces the position before 1976, when education was a state subject ringed by Union enclaves. It explains what the Forty-second Amendment actually did and what it left alone. It then works through the fields where concurrency bites in practice: the cost and norm structure of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the single medical entrance examination and the state quota built around it, the appointment of vice chancellors and the office of chancellor, and the implementation quarrels that the National Education Policy 2020 set running. Through all of it runs the repugnancy rule of Article 254, the provision that decides what happens when both levels of government have legislated and the two laws cannot stand together, and the assent route in its second clause, which is the only lawful door through which a state law can prevail over a central one and which the Union executive, in practice, keeps locked.

The constitutional map: one subject, three lists

The Seventh Schedule distributes legislative power through three lists, and education is one of the few subjects that appears, in one form or another, in all three. That spread is the first thing to grasp, because most public argument in this field proceeds as though education sat in a single entry and the only question were which list it belonged to. The truth is a layered competence in which the layer that applies depends on the character of the measure, and characterisation, not list membership, is where the cases are won and lost.

Which list is education in, the State List, the Union List or the Concurrent List?

Education sits in the Concurrent List, at Entry 25 of List III, where both Parliament and the state legislatures may legislate on it. Layered over that shared field, the Union List holds four entries of its own, Entries 63 to 66, which are exclusively Parliament’s, and the State List keeps Entry 32 of List II on the incorporation of universities.

The result is a subject shared in general, reserved to the Union at its heights, and anchored in the states at the point where institutions are created, with one education entry of real weight remaining in the State List, the entry covering the incorporation, regulation and winding up of universities.

Entry 25 of the Concurrent List, in the form the Forty-second Amendment gave it, reads: “Education, including technical education, medical education and universities, subject to the provisions of entries 63, 64, 65 and 66 of List I; vocational and technical training of labour.” Every clause of that sentence does work. The opening words place the whole of education, at every level from the primary classroom to the university senate, within the shared field. The middle clause then subordinates the whole entry to the four Union entries, so that the shared field is shared only in the space those entries leave. The closing words bring the vocational and technical training of labour inside the same entry, which is why the industrial training institutes and the apprenticeship structure are legislated on the same competence as the universities. A reader who skips the subordination clause will misunderstand everything that follows, because Entry 25 does not give the states an equal share of a field; it gives them a field with a reserved core carved out of it.

The four Union entries deserve to be taken one at a time, because their differences decide real cases. Entry 63 covers the institutions known at the commencement of the Constitution as the Benares Hindu University, the Aligarh Muslim University and the University of Delhi, the university established in pursuance of Article 371E, and any other institution declared by Parliament by law to be an institution of national importance. It is the entry under which the central universities, the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management rest, and it is a power of designation: Parliament may lift an institution, or a class of institutions, out of the shared field altogether by declaring it to be of national importance. Entry 64 covers institutions for scientific or technical education financed by the Government of India wholly or in part and declared by Parliament by law to be institutions of national importance, a narrower and finance-linked cousin of Entry 63. Entry 65 covers Union agencies and institutions for professional, vocational or technical training, including the training of police officers, for the promotion of special studies or research, and for scientific or technical assistance in the investigation or detection of crime. It sustains the Union’s own training and research establishments. Entry 66, the decisive one, covers the “co-ordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions”, and a full section below is devoted to what those words have been held to carry.

Against those four, the states hold one entry that the centralising narrative habitually forgets. Entry 32 of the State List covers the “incorporation, regulation and winding up of corporations, other than those specified in List I, and universities”, together with unincorporated societies and associations and co-operative societies. The express exclusion of universities from Entry 44 of the Union List, which deals with corporations with objects not confined to one state but adds the words “not including universities”, confirms the design: the incorporation of a university is, as a matter of constitutional text, state business. This is why every state university in India exists because a state legislature enacted a university Act, why the chancellor, the court, the executive council and the academic council of a state university are creatures of a state statute, and why the states describe the administration of their universities as their remaining exclusive competence. The description is accurate as far as the text goes. The difficulty, which the case law section takes up, is that a university is not only incorporated; it also teaches, examines, admits, appoints and awards degrees, and each of those functions can be characterised as a standard and pulled toward Entry 66.

The map is applied by a method, and the method must be understood before the cases make sense. When a law is challenged as exceeding the legislature that made it, the courts ask for its pith and substance, its true character and object, and assign it to the entry that character fits; an incidental touching of another legislature’s field does not invalidate it. Article 246 gives Parliament exclusive power over List I, gives the state legislatures exclusive power over List II subject to the Union and concurrent powers, and gives both power over List III. The non-obstante openings of those clauses are what convert characterisation into hierarchy. A measure whose pith and substance is the determination of standards falls under Entry 66 even if it operates, incidentally and unavoidably, on the administration of a state university, because Article 246 subordinates the state power to the Union power in terms. Conversely, a measure whose pith and substance is the administration of a state institution does not fall merely because good administration improves standards as a side effect, a distinction without which Entry 66 would swallow Entry 32 whole and the framers’ careful exclusion of universities from the Union’s corporation entry would be pointless. Every judgment discussed in this article is an application of that method to contested facts, and every political argument in the field is, whether its maker knows it or not, a submission about how the method should characterise a measure. The reader who keeps the method in view will notice that the courts’ outcomes are less a series of central victories than a series of characterisations, each open to being argued the other way on the next set of facts, which is the deepest reason the boundary litigation in this field never ends.

One more feature of the map matters for everything that follows, and it is about money rather than competence. Legislative entries allocate the power to make law; they do not allocate the duty to pay. The great central education statutes of the concurrent era are executed overwhelmingly through state machinery and state budgets, with the Union contributing through centrally sponsored schemes whose sharing patterns are set administratively. A state can therefore hold a grievance about education that is entirely financial even where its legal competence is intact, and a Union law can be within competence while remaining, in a state’s telling, an unfunded instruction. The Right to Education Act makes the point concrete below.

Before the transfer: a state subject with Union enclaves

The position the Forty-second Amendment displaced was not an accident of drafting. Under the Government of India Act, 1935, education was a provincial subject, and the Constituent Assembly carried that allocation forward. As enacted in 1950, Entry 11 of the State List read: “Education including universities, subject to the provisions of entries 63, 64, 65 and 66 of List I and entry 25 of List III.” The entry 25 of List III referred to in that sentence was a different and narrower entry from the one that bears the number in the substituted list; it covered the vocational and technical training of labour. The structure of the original settlement is worth pausing on, because it shows that the framers were not choosing between a state monopoly and a shared field. They chose a state field with the Union enclaves already cut into it. The standards entry, the institutions-of-national-importance entry and the Union agencies entry were all present from the first day, which is the textual foundation for the claim, made throughout this article, that the operative centralising instrument predates the Emergency by twenty-six years.

What the Union did with its enclaves before 1976 was considerable. Parliament enacted the University Grants Commission Act in 1956, resting the Commission and its power to determine and maintain standards of teaching, examination and research squarely on Entry 66, two decades before education became a concurrent subject. The Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 declared the Indian Institutes of Technology to be institutions of national importance under Entry 63. The Union ran its own universities under Entry 63, funded research under Entry 65, and used its spending power to shape state systems it had no competence to direct, most influentially through the three-language formula commended by the Education Commission of 1964 to 1966, chaired by Dr D. S. Kothari, and adopted in the National Policy on Education of 1968. The Kothari Commission is the intellectual bridge between the two eras: it argued for a national system of education, common structures and national standards, while leaving the administration of the system with the states, and both halves of that argument are still quoted, by opposite sides, in the disputes of the present day.

The institution-building of the period deserves a paragraph of its own, because it shows the Union enclaves being used with an ambition that the later transfer merely generalised. The University Education Commission of 1948 and 1949, chaired by Dr S. Radhakrishnan, had recommended a grants body on the model of the British University Grants Committee, and Parliament’s Act of 1956 gave the recommendation statutory form with the standards charge written into it. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences was created by its own Act of 1956 as an institution of national importance, taking medical education at its apex out of the state field by designation. The Indian Institutes of Technology followed under their Act of 1961, and the Indian Institutes of Management were built from the nineteen-sixties onward through the societies route under Union sponsorship. A pattern was set that has never since been broken: whenever the Union has wanted an educational capacity entirely its own, it has not needed the concurrent power at all, because Entries 63 and 64 let it designate and fund institutions of national importance and Entry 65 lets it keep its own agencies, and the state in whose territory the institution sits has no more say over it than over a railway. The states accepted the pattern in the decades of scarcity because the institutions were few, prestigious and open to their students on national merit. The argument began when the same techniques, designation, standards and central funding, were extended from a handful of apex institutions to the governance of the whole system.

The states, for their part, did the governing. They enacted the university Acts, ran the school systems, prescribed the syllabuses, appointed the teachers and set the examinations. Where a state measure crossed into the reserved enclaves, the courts policed the boundary with the text of 1950, and the leading early decision is the one that fixed the meaning of the standards entry for the next sixty years. In Gujarat University v Krishna Ranganath Mudholkar, decided in 1963, the Supreme Court considered Gujarat legislation and university statutes that imposed Gujarati, or Hindi in the Devanagari script, as the exclusive medium of instruction and examination at the university. The Court held that the state power over education, then in Entry 11 of the State List, was subject to Entry 66, and that a measure prescribing the medium of instruction, insofar as it affected the co-ordination and determination of standards in higher education, fell within the Union field. The state could legislate on its universities; it could not, by choosing the medium, determine a matter the Court characterised as bound up with standards. The case is the template for the whole later line: the state measure is not struck down for touching education, which is plainly its field, but for operating, in pith and substance, on the reserved question of what a degree must represent.

The Forty-second Amendment: what moved and what stayed

The transfer itself was recommended by the Swaran Singh Committee, the body the Congress party constituted during the Emergency to propose constitutional changes, which advised placing education in the Concurrent List so that all-India policies could be framed on the subject. The Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, which received assent in December 1976, implemented the recommendation through its section 57, in force from 3 January 1977. The mechanics matter for precision. The amendment did not add a new entry to the Concurrent List from nothing. It omitted Entry 11 of the State List, and it substituted the existing Entry 25 of the Concurrent List with the wide education entry quoted above, gathering the general subject and the training of labour into a single concurrent entry expressly subordinated to Entries 63 to 66 of the Union List. Education was one of five subjects transferred by that amendment, alongside forests, weights and measures, the protection of wild animals and birds, and the administration of justice, and the company it kept is part of the series record: the movement of forests and of wild animals and birds by the same amendment is traced in the environmental cluster of this series, and the transfers were a single centralising gesture applied to several fields at once. The amendment of the Seventh Schedule required ratification by the states under the proviso to Article 368, and the ratifications were given by legislatures sitting during the Emergency, which is a fact about the transfer that its critics have never allowed to be forgotten and its defenders answer by pointing to everything enacted on the faith of it since.

What the amendment did not do is as important as what it did. It did not touch Entries 63, 64, 65 or 66 of the Union List, which continued exactly as the framers wrote them. It did not touch Entry 32 of the State List, so the incorporation and regulation of universities remained with the states. It did not create any central regulator, prescribe any curriculum, or set any standard. It changed the default rule for the general field: where before 1976 a central education statute needed a specific Union entry to rest on, after 1976 Parliament could legislate on education at large, for the whole country, subject to the fundamental rights and to the states’ continuing concurrent competence. The statutes that followed, the National Council for Teacher Education Act of 1993, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act of 2009 and the National Medical Commission Act of 2019 among them, are the transfer’s working legacy, and none of them could have been enacted in that form on the text of 1950.

Did the 44th Amendment try to move education back to the State List?

Yes, in substance, and the attempt failed in the Rajya Sabha. The Janata Party government that succeeded the Emergency administration brought forward its own amendment bill proposing, among other reversals, the restoration of the transferred subjects, education among them, to the State List, and the upper House declined to accept it.

The Rajya Sabha, in which the Congress party retained the strength to block clauses it opposed, declined to accept several of the bill’s provisions, and the restoration of education was among the proposals that did not survive. The Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978 as finally enacted therefore reversed much of the Forty-second Amendment’s work on emergency powers, property and the terms of the legislatures, and left the Seventh Schedule transfers exactly where 1976 had put them.

No government of any composition has reversed the transfer since, and the reason is structural rather than ideological. Reversal would require a constitutional amendment altering the Seventh Schedule, which under the proviso to Article 368 must be ratified by the legislatures of not less than half the states after passage by special majority in each House. A Union government gains nothing from proposing it: the transfer is the foundation of its education statutes, its regulators and its scheme architecture. The demand for return is kept alive by state governments and by committees of the states’ own making, most prominently in Tamil Nadu, where the Rajamannar Committee on Centre-state relations, appointed by the state government in 1969, had recommended a redistribution of powers toward the states even before the transfer occurred, and where the two-language policy and the entrance test dispute have made education the state’s emblematic federal grievance. The Sarkaria Commission on Centre-state relations, reporting in 1988, considered the architecture of the lists and declined to recommend a return of education to the states, counselling instead that the Union should exercise its concurrent power with restraint and through consultation with the states. The Punchhi Commission, reporting in 2010, counselled in the same direction: Union legislation on concurrent subjects should be preceded by consultation, and the Inter-State Council and the Central Advisory Board of Education are the standing machinery for it. The Central Advisory Board of Education, chaired by the Union Minister of Education and bringing the state education ministers to one table, is the forum in which national education policy has historically been negotiated, and complaint that it meets too rarely, or that policy is announced before it is consulted, is a recurring element in the states’ case.

Entry 66: the entry that did the centralising

Read the whole argument of this article in one sentence: Entry 66 is short, abstract and absolute, and everything in Indian higher education federalism is an argument about the reach of its two verbs, co-ordination and determination. The entry confers power over standards in institutions for higher education or research and in scientific and technical institutions. It does not say minimum standards. It does not say standards of teaching only. It does not confine the power to advice, to funding conditions, or to institutions the Union maintains. The courts have read it as a plenary power to determine what standards shall be, and a standard, once determined, binds every institution within the description whether a state created it, funds it or staffs it.

The regulators stand on this entry in a line that runs unbroken from 1956. The University Grants Commission Act, 1956 charges the Commission with the co-ordination and determination of standards of university education in nearly the words of the entry itself, and empowers it to make regulations on the minimum qualifications of teachers, on the maintenance of standards of instruction, and on the qualifications and process for appointing the heads of universities, which is the point at which the entry reaches deepest into state administration and where the University Grants Commission Act explained in this series takes up the institutional story. The All India Council for Technical Education Act, 1987 built the technical education regulator on the same foundation, and in State of Tamil Nadu v Adhiyaman Educational and Research Institute, decided in 1995, the Supreme Court held that where the central Act occupied the field of technical education standards, state legislation and state government orders inconsistent with it could not stand; the state role in technical education survived, but as administration under the central scheme, not as a rival determination of standards. The National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993 extended the logic to the training of teachers, a subject states had treated as their own; the National Medical Commission Act, 2019 carries it in medicine. The National Testing Agency, created by a Cabinet decision in 2017 as an executive agency rather than by statute, conducts the entrance examinations through which the standards regime admits its students. None of these bodies is elected by, appointed by, or answerable to any state legislature, and that, in the states’ submission, is the point: a power described in the text as co-ordination has become, by accumulation, a power of government over institutions the Union neither founded nor funds.

Can the Centre set standards for a state university it does not run?

Yes, and the funding of the institution is irrelevant to the power. Entry 66 attaches to the character of the institution, an institution for higher education or research, and not to its ownership, its source of funds or the legislature that incorporated it, which is why Commission regulations reach state universities without the state’s consent.

A university created by a state Act, financed from a state budget and governed by a state-appointed executive council is within the entry in exactly the same measure as a central university, which is why University Grants Commission regulations on teacher qualifications and vice chancellor selection bind it as they bind any other university.

The case law built the doctrine in stages, and the stages should be kept distinct. Gujarat University in 1963 fixed the subordination: state power over education yields where a measure operates on standards. Adhiyaman in 1995 fixed the occupation point for technical education: a central statute laying down norms and standards for technical institutions displaced inconsistent state provision on the same ground. Preeti Srivastava v State of Madhya Pradesh, decided by a Constitution Bench in 1999, fixed the admission point: the determination of standards for admission to postgraduate medical courses, including the extent to which reservation could dilute the qualifying standard, was a matter for the central medical regulator under the standards power, and a state rule that lowered the qualifying standard for reserved categories below the floor the regulator had set could not survive. The same judgment accepted that standards are not exhausted by a floor at the point of entry; the state remained free to regulate admissions in ways consistent with the central standard, and the distinction between diluting a standard and administering an admission is the distinction the whole field turns on. Prof. Yashpal v State of Chhattisgarh, decided in 2005, fixed the establishment point from the other side. Chhattisgarh had amended its university legislation to permit the establishment of private universities by notification, in profusion and with minimal scrutiny, and the Supreme Court struck the provisions down. The judgment accepted that incorporation of universities is state business under the State List entry, and held nonetheless that a state cannot use the incorporation power to create institutions that are universities in name while defeating the standards the Union entry protects; the incorporating power and the standards power meet at the point where the institution claims the name and privileges of a university. The doctrinal position that emerges is neither central monopoly nor state autonomy. It is a hierarchy of characterisations: establishment and administration belong to the state, standards belong to the Union, and the boundary dispute in any given case is a dispute about which description fits the contested act.

One power in the Commission’s Act deserves separate notice because it crosses the incorporation line itself. Section 3 of the University Grants Commission Act empowers the Central Government, on the advice of the Commission, to declare an institution for higher education to be deemed to be a university, with the consequence that the institution acquires the status and degree-awarding capacity of a university without any state legislature enacting a university Act for it at all. The device was designed for distinguished specialist institutions that did not fit the affiliating university mould, and for decades it was used sparingly. Its expansion in the first decade of this century, when deemed status was conferred on a large number of institutions, many of them private and fee-charging, brought the device into the federal argument, because a state could find a university operating in its territory, admitting its students and awarding degrees, which its own legislature had never created and whose creation its own incorporating power had not authorised. The review committee appointed by the Union government in 2009, chaired by Professor P. N. Tandon, examined the deemed universities and reported that a substantial number did not merit the status, and the litigation and corrective process that followed ran for years. The episode is included here because it isolates the pure form of the centralising technique: not a standard imposed on a state institution, but the creation of the institution itself by central declaration, resting on the standards entry read with the Commission’s Act. If Entry 66 can carry that, the states ask, what in the government of a university can it not carry, and the question has never received a judicial answer in general terms, because each case has been decided on the character of the particular measure before the court.

A parallel architecture, older than most of the regulators and easily overlooked, runs through the professions. Entry 26 of the Concurrent List covers the legal, medical and other professions, and under it and the Union entries for the higher judiciary’s professions, Parliament built statutory councils for the professions, the Bar Council of India under the Advocates Act, 1961, the medical council under the Indian Medical Council Act of 1956 and its successor commission, and councils for pharmacy, dentistry, nursing and architecture, each charged among other things with the standards of the education that qualifies a person for the profession. The professional council is the standards technique in its purest institutional form: a body that controls entry to a livelihood by prescribing the curriculum, the institution and the examination through which alone a qualification counts, and whose prescriptions bind state institutions and state governments without any recourse to Entry 25 at all. The courts sustained the architecture early, holding in the Bar Council line of cases that the regulation of professional education by the statutory council prevails over university and state arrangements that conflict with it. The relevance to the federalism argument is that professional education, the most contested sector in the admission and fee cases, was never governed by the education entries alone; it sits at the crossing of the education entries and the professions entry, and a state legislating for its medical or law colleges faces not one central interlocutor but a set of them, each with its own statute. When the states complain of a thicket of central regulators, this is a large part of the thicket they mean, and it grew by professional statute over decades rather than by any single centralising decision, which is why no single reform has ever thinned it.

The private institution cases complete the picture, because they mark the ground the states kept. In TMA Pai Foundation v State of Karnataka, decided in 2002 by eleven judges, the Supreme Court held that unaided educational institutions, minority and non-minority alike, hold a right to establish and administer institutions, including a substantial measure of control over admissions and fees, subject to regulation in the interest of standards and fairness. Islamic Academy of Education v State of Karnataka, in 2003, built the interim machinery of state-level committees, headed by retired judges, to supervise admissions and approve fees in professional colleges. P. A. Inamdar v State of Maharashtra, in 2005, confirmed that the state could not impose its own quota on unaided minority and non-minority professional institutions, while leaving the institutions bound by common standards and by a common entrance process. Modern Dental College and Research Centre v State of Madhya Pradesh, in 2016, upheld a Madhya Pradesh statute regulating admissions and fees in unaided professional colleges as a permissible exercise of the state’s regulatory power. The pattern across the line is consistent, and it is the pattern the artifact table below records field by field: the Union determines what must be true of an institution and its entrants for a qualification to count; the states, and within limits the institutions themselves, decide who is admitted from among those who qualify, what is charged within a supervised structure, and how the institution is run from day to day.

When both legislate: Article 254 and the assent door

Concurrency would be unworkable without a tie-breaker, and Article 254 is the tie-breaker. Its first clause provides that where a state law on a concurrent subject is repugnant to a law made by Parliament, or to an existing law on that subject, the parliamentary law prevails and the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy. Its second clause carries the exception on which so much of this article depends: where a state law on a concurrent subject, containing provisions repugnant to an earlier parliamentary law, has been reserved for the consideration of the President and has received the President’s assent, the state law prevails in that state. A proviso then restores Parliament’s hand: nothing in the second clause prevents Parliament from enacting a later law on the same matter, including a law that adds to, amends, varies or repeals the state law so assented. The full machinery of the provision, and its operation outside education, is the subject of the account of the Seventh Schedule and its three lists and of Article 254 and the doctrine of repugnancy elsewhere in this series; what matters here is how the doctrine behaves on education facts.

What happens when a central law and a state law on education conflict?

The central law prevails, and the state law is void to the extent of the conflict, unless the state law was reserved for the President and received assent under Article 254(2), in which case the state law prevails within that state until Parliament legislates again on the matter.

Courts first ask whether the two laws can be obeyed together and whether Parliament intended to occupy the field; a conflict found only after interpretation, not a mere difference of detail, is what triggers the rule.

The courts have disciplined the doctrine with tests that keep it narrower than its text suggests. In M. Karunanidhi v Union of India, decided in 1979, the Supreme Court collected the conditions: the two laws must occupy the same field, there must be a direct conflict such that obedience to both is impossible or one takes away what the other confers, and the parliamentary law must be within competence. Where the state law has received assent under the second clause, as the Tamil Nadu law in that case had, it prevails in the state notwithstanding the repugnancy. Zaverbhai Amaidas v State of Bombay, decided in 1954, supplies the qualification that disciplines the exception: presidential assent protects the state law against the parliamentary law as it stood, but where Parliament later amends its own law in the same field, the amended central law prevails over the assented state law, because the assent was given against the earlier text and cannot bind Parliament’s later exercise of the same power. Hoechst Pharmaceuticals v State of Bihar, decided in 1983, adds the field discipline: repugnancy is judged within the entry the laws in substance occupy, and a state law on a distinct aspect of a subject does not fall merely because a central law exists somewhere in the neighbourhood. Applied to education, the doctrine yields a sequence every state law department works through. Is the contested state provision in substance on a concurrent matter, or is it on standards, where the Union power is exclusive and no assent can cure the defect, because Article 254 governs repugnancy between laws in the concurrent field and does not manufacture competence where the Constitution has placed the subject in List I? If it is concurrent, can the two laws be read together? If they cannot, has the assent route been used, and has Parliament legislated since? The vice chancellor litigation below is best understood as a case in which the states’ argument failed at the first of those questions in the courts’ characterisation, which is why it was lost without the assent route ever being reached.

The assent route’s working record in education is short enough to be stated whole, and it should be, because both sides cite it selectively. It has succeeded: Tamil Nadu’s legislation of 2006 abolishing the state common entrance test for professional courses was reserved, assented to, and governed the state’s admissions for a decade, and state amendments to central statutes in other fields have used the route routinely enough that no one disputes its formal availability. It has failed: the Tamil Nadu medical admission Bill of 2021 and the West Bengal chancellor bills of 2022 were each refused after long pendency, in each case where the state law’s purpose was to displace a settled position of the Union government of the day. And it has been qualified even in success, because Zaverbhai establishes that an assented state law holds its ground only until Parliament next legislates in the field, at which point the state’s protection must be sought again. The pattern the record shows is not that the door is locked against every bill; it is that the door opens readily for state laws that adjust a central scheme at its edges and does not open for state laws that contradict the scheme’s centre, which is precisely the class of case for which a federal safety valve is supposed to exist. That is a conclusion about the design’s operation, stated on the record of its use, and it is the analytical core of the states’ complaint about Article 254(2): the clause promises a state the possibility of a different law within its own territory, and delivers that possibility into the keeping of the government whose law is to be differed from.

A further distinction in the machinery matters to the education bills and is often missed. Reservation can occur at two points. A Governor may reserve a bill under Article 200 of the Governor’s own motion, which is the route the chancellor bills and the Tamil Nadu admission Bill travelled. Separately, certain categories of bill must be reserved, and a bill that would derogate from the powers of the High Court is the standard example. For a repugnant concurrent-subject law, reservation is not a courtesy but a functional necessity, since without assent the law is void against the central statute anyway, and a Governor who assents to such a bill without reserving it produces a law that fails at the first challenge. State law departments therefore draft for the reservation from the outset in this field, writing the bill as an Article 254(2) instrument, collecting the record of the state’s case for the departure, and addressing the Union ministries’ objections in the intergovernmental correspondence that precedes the President’s decision, as Tamil Nadu’s pleadings describe it doing on the admission Bill. The process is a negotiation conducted in the forms of a constitutional formality, and its outcomes, assent for the entrance test abolition of 2006 and refusal for the exemption of 2021, track the Union’s policy position at the time each was decided more closely than they track any difference in the legal quality of the two bills.

Standards or administration: the contested fields in one view

The table that follows is this article’s findable artifact, and it is built to be used. Each row takes one contested subject, names the entry each side relies on, records which level prevails in the position the courts and the practice have produced, gives the leading authority, and marks whether the boundary in that field is settled or still contested.

Contested subject	Entry the states rely on	Entry the Union relies on	Which level prevails	Leading authority	Settled or contested
Minimum teacher qualifications	Entry 25 of List III	Entry 66 of List I	The Union, as a floor	Preeti Srivastava (1999); the UGC and NCTE regulations	Settled as a floor; additions above it contested
Curriculum	Entry 25 of List III	Entries 25 of List III and 66 of List I	Shared; states prescribe for their boards, national frameworks are advisory	Section 29 of the RTE Act 2009 design	Contested in practice
Admission criteria	Entry 25 of List III	Entry 66 of List I	The Union on minimum eligibility; the states on process	Preeti Srivastava (1999); Modern Dental College (2016)	Partly settled
Entrance examination	Entry 25 of List III	Entries 66 of List I and 25 of List III	The Union, for medicine	Christian Medical College Vellore Association (2020)	Settled in law; contested in politics
Fee regulation	Entry 25 of List III	Entry 66 of List I	The states, through supervised fixation	TMA Pai (2002); Islamic Academy (2003); Modern Dental College (2016)	Settled in principle
Appointment of the head of a state university	Entry 32 of List II and the state university Acts	Entry 66 of List I, through the UGC Regulations	The Union, on the prescribed procedure	Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi (2022); Sreejith P.S. (2022)	Settled in law; contested in politics
Establishment of a new university	Entry 32 of List II; Entry 25 of List III	Entry 66 of List I	The states establish; the Union polices the name and the standards	Prof. Yashpal (2005)	Settled in principle

Read the table column by column and the series thesis of this cluster emerges from it. The Union prevails wherever the contested act can be described as fixing what a qualification is worth: the floor of teacher qualification, the minimum eligibility for admission, the single test through which medical entrants are ranked, the procedure that guarantees the head of a university meets a national pattern. The states prevail wherever the act is described as running an institution: fixing its fees under supervision, prescribing its school curriculum, conducting its admissions among the qualified, incorporating it in the first place. The contested rows are the rows where the description itself is disputed, and no row is more disputed than the appointment of the head of the institution, because a search committee can be characterised, with equal plausibility, as a guarantee of academic standards or as the staffing decision of the institution’s owner.

Worked field one: school education and the RTE settlement

School education is where the transfer of 1976 did its most direct work, because it is the field in which Parliament had the least purchase under the old text. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, enacted under the concurrent power and brought into force on 1 April 2010, imposed a national template on the most state-administered of all public services: a neighbourhood school within prescribed distance, norms and standards for buildings, school hours and teacher deployment set out in a Schedule to the Act, a bar on screening and capitation, a twenty-five per cent reservation of entry-level seats in private unaided schools for children of disadvantaged groups and weaker sections, and duties laid on the appropriate government, a term the Act defines so that both the Centre and the states carry obligations under it. The pillar article on the Act in this series works through its provisions in full; the federalism point is the division of labour the Act records. Section 7 of the Act provides that the Central Government and the state governments shall have concurrent responsibility for providing funds for carrying out its provisions, and fixes no ratio between them. The sharing pattern has consequently been set by the programme framework through which the money flows, standing at sixty-five parts Centre to thirty-five parts state for most states in the years after commencement and revised to sixty to forty for most states, with a more favourable pattern for the north-eastern and Himalayan states. The Act’s design therefore makes the fiscal federalism of school education a standing negotiation rather than a settled term, and arguments about the underfunding of the mandate are arguments about budget heads and release patterns, not about breach of any figure the statute states.

The norms side of the Act shows the standards technique operating inside a concurrent statute rather than against a state law. The pupil-teacher ratios and infrastructure norms sit in the Schedule, amendable by notification, so the Union executive can tighten or relax the national standard without returning to Parliament. The qualification side shows the regulator technique: Section 23 of the Act makes eligibility for appointment as a teacher depend on minimum qualifications laid down by an academic authority authorised by the Central Government, and the authority designated is the National Council for Teacher Education, so a central regulator’s prescription governs hiring in every state-run classroom in the country. The amendment history shows the negotiation running the other way. The no-detention rule, under which no child could be held back until the completion of elementary education, was opposed by state governments that blamed it for falling learning levels, and Parliament amended the Act in 2019 to permit the appropriate government to hold back a child in class five or class eight after additional instruction and a re-examination, with the decision expressly left to each government. A central standard was relaxed, on state demand, through the concurrent process, and the episode is the states’ own best evidence that the concurrent field is a field of negotiation and not of command alone. The conduct of examinations within the states is policed in parallel by the states’ own public examination and unfair means legislation, a body of state law surveyed in the article on examination malpractice law in India, and by the central Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act of 2024 for the examinations it schedules, so that even the integrity of the school-leaving examination is a shared jurisdiction in which each level legislates for the examinations it conducts. The administration of the Act’s most litigated provision tells the same story from below. The twenty-five per cent reservation in private schools is executed entirely by state machinery: the state frames its rules under the Act, notifies its per-child expenditure, runs the admission process and reimburses the schools to the extent of that expenditure or the fee charged, whichever is less, so that the lived content of a central statutory right, which school, at what reimbursement, on what timetable of payment, is determined in state secretariats and has diverged widely between states, as the implementation article in this series records. Recognition of schools, and its withdrawal for failure to meet the norms, is likewise administered by state authorities under the Act. The Right to Education Act is therefore best described not as a central law imposed on state systems but as a central frame filled in by state administration, with the friction concentrated at the two points the frame leaves open, the money ratio the Act declines to fix and the norms the Schedule lets the Union amend by notification. A reader who understands why those two open points, and not the Act’s existence, generate the disputes understands the fiscal and standards techniques that the rest of this article traces in the harder fields.

The money: fiscal federalism beneath the legal federalism

No account of this subject is complete without the layer the entries do not mention, because in practice the Centre and the states argue about money at least as often as they argue about competence, and the two arguments are easily confused. The Constitution separates the power to legislate from the power to tax and spend. Education is an expensive subject administered almost entirely by the states, whose own revenues are limited, while the Union holds the broader tax heads. The bridge between them is the Union’s spending power, exercised through grants for public purposes and organised, for education, into centrally sponsored schemes under which the Union pays a share of an approved programme and the state pays the rest and does the work. The sharing pattern of those schemes is set by executive decision, not by the Constitution and not usually by statute. When the Fourteenth Finance Commission raised the states’ share of the divisible pool of taxes, the Union recast the sharing patterns of the centrally sponsored schemes on a general pattern of sixty to forty between Centre and state, with ninety to ten for the north-eastern and Himalayan states, and education’s great integrated scheme, Samagra Shiksha, runs on that pattern. The consequence for the federalism of education is that the Union’s influence over state classrooms runs through two distinct channels which must not be merged in analysis: the legal channel of entries, statutes and regulations, where its authority is defined and litigable, and the fiscal channel of schemes, memoranda and releases, where its authority is the authority of a paymaster and is contested politically rather than in court.

The fiscal channel generates its own constitutional argument, and Tamil Nadu’s Samagra Shiksha suit has carried that argument into the Supreme Court in terms. The state’s case is that a scheme which funds the performance of a statutory duty, the schooling the Right to Education Act obliges both governments to fund concurrently, cannot be withheld to compel adoption of a policy, the National Education Policy, which the state is under no legal duty to adopt, without converting fiscal partnership into legislative coercion and hollowing out the state’s choice in a field where the Constitution gives it an equal legislative voice. The Union’s answer, made by the Minister of Education in Parliament, is that a state is free to decline the policy and equally free to decline the programme, but cannot claim the programme’s money while refusing the programme’s terms, and that every centrally sponsored scheme in every field has always run on conditions. Both positions are coherent, and the case will require the Court to say something it has not yet said in a general form: whether there are constitutional limits on the conditions the Union may attach to education money, and if so, where they lie. Until it is decided, the fiscal channel remains the least legally disciplined part of the whole structure, which is why a state that loses every legal argument in this article can still fight the Union to a standstill over a memorandum of understanding, and why a Union that has won every case can still fail to get its policy taught in a single classroom of a refusing state.

One older instrument deserves mention because it shows the fiscal channel being used for the standards end by a route that bypassed the lists altogether. The Union levies an education cess on its taxes, an earmarked surcharge whose proceeds are dedicated to education spending, supplemented by a secondary and higher education cess. The cess is a Union tax, imposed under the Union’s taxing entries, and its proceeds are spent substantially inside state systems through the schemes. No state consent is required and none is sought, and yet the arrangement has attracted little federal complaint, because money arriving is rarely resented in the way instructions arriving are. The contrast is instructive for the whole subject. The states’ federalism in education is not a demand for the Union’s absence; it is a demand about the form of the Union’s presence, and money without commands has historically been the form the states accept, while commands without money, the unfunded mandate, and money conditioned on commands, are the two forms they resist.

Worked field two: NEET, the state quota, and the limits of exemption

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test is the standards technique applied to the threshold of a profession, and medical admission is where concurrency has been litigated hardest. The legal route ran in three steps. A single national test for medical admissions was first attempted by regulation, and in Christian Medical College, Vellore v Union of India, decided in 2013, the Supreme Court struck the regulations down, principally as an invasion of the rights of institutions, minority and unaided alike, to administer their own admissions. A review bench in 2016 recalled that judgment and restored the question for fresh decision. Parliament then put the test on a statutory footing: the Indian Medical Council (Amendment) Act, 2016 inserted a provision for a uniform entrance examination, the NEET, and the Supreme Court in Sankalp Charitable Trust v Union of India, in 2016, directed admissions through it. The National Medical Commission Act, 2019 consolidated the position, providing in its Section 14 for a common national examination for admission to undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. In Christian Medical College Vellore Association v Union of India, decided in 2020, the Court upheld the application of the test to unaided and minority institutions, holding that a uniform examination directed at standards does not destroy the right to administer, because admission from among those who qualify remains with the institution and the counselling authority. The sequence is the standards doctrine in motion: what could not be done by the regulator’s regulation against a fundamental-rights challenge was done by Parliament’s statute and sustained as a determination of standards.

What the single test did not do is equally important to the federal balance, because the admission it governs is administered through a quota structure that reserves the operative decisions to the states. Fifteen per cent of seats in government medical colleges form an all-India quota filled through central counselling on the national merit list. The remaining eighty-five per cent form the state quota, filled by the state counselling authority from the same national merit list but under the state’s own reservation policy, domicile rules and category structure. The litigation around the quota has confirmed the division from both directions. In Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association v Union of India, decided in 2020, the Supreme Court upheld the competence of states to provide reservation for in-service government doctors in postgraduate admissions within the state quota, treating the regulation of the state’s own health service as a matter the state could govern consistently with the national examination. In Neil Aurelio Nunes v Union of India, decided in 2022, the Court upheld the provision of reservation for other backward classes and economically weaker sections in the all-India quota itself. The working settlement is therefore precise: the Union determines the test and the merit list, because ranking entrants is characterised as a standard; the states determine the distributive rules for the seats their institutions offer, because assigning places among the qualified is characterised as administration. The settlement’s details repay attention, because they show administration doing real distributive work inside a standards frame. In private medical colleges, the state quota of seats is likewise filled through state counselling on the national merit list, so the state’s reservation policy reaches institutions it neither owns nor funds, a reach sustained as regulation of admission rather than determination of the standard of entry. Domicile and residence conditions for the state quota are framed by the states and have been litigated as equality questions rather than competence questions, and the states’ power to reserve seats in postgraduate courses for doctors serving in their own health services, upheld in the Tamil Nadu Medical Officers Association case, rests on the same distinction: the merit list is national, the purposes for which a state husband its share of the list are its own. Postgraduate admission repeats the undergraduate pattern at a higher stake, since the in-service reservation determines who staffs the state’s hospitals while specialising, and the Union’s attempt in the all-India quota to govern the whole list centrally was itself corrected by the reservation the Court upheld in the Nunes case. What no part of the structure permits is a second merit list. A state may rank the qualified by its own distributive rules; it may not qualify the unqualified, nor substitute its own examination as the measure of qualification, and every element of Tamil Nadu’s objection that matters, the coaching advantage, the state board disadvantage, the social composition of the entering class, is an objection to the single measure of qualification and not to the distribution that follows it. That is why the dispute could not be settled inside the counselling rules and had to be taken to the assent road and then to the Court.

A state that accepts the settlement obtains a great deal of real power. A state that rejects the test itself obtains nothing, and that is the proposition Tamil Nadu set out to break.

Who conducts the national medical entrance test, and under which law?

The National Testing Agency conducts the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test as the examining agency under the National Medical Commission Act, 2019, whose Section 14 provides for a single common entrance examination for admission to medical education at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

The examination began under an amendment to the Indian Medical Council Act in 2016, and the 2019 Act carried the design into the successor regulator’s statute, which is why a challenge to the test is a challenge to an Act of Parliament and not merely to a regulator’s preference.

Tamil Nadu’s route was the assent door, and its history shows both that the door is real and who holds the key. The state had used the route before: its legislation of 2006 abolishing the state-level common entrance test for professional courses was reserved for the President, received assent, and governed admissions in the state for a decade, which is why the state’s lawyers describe Article 254(2) as a working feature of the Constitution and not a dead letter. When the national test displaced that settlement, a committee under a retired judge of the Madras High Court, Justice A. K. Rajan, appointed by the state government in 2021, reported that the test disadvantaged students of the state board, of rural schools and of poorer families, and the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly in September 2021 passed the Tamil Nadu Admission to Undergraduate Medical Degree Courses Bill, 2021, which proposed admission on the basis of Class XII marks with normalisation, in express departure from the central statute. The Bill was a deliberate Article 254(2) instrument: repugnant to the central law, it required reservation and assent to prevail in the state. The Governor, R. N. Ravi, returned the Bill to the Assembly; the Assembly re-adopted it in February 2022; the Governor then reserved it for the consideration of the President. In March 2025 the state was informed through the Governor’s Secretariat that assent had been withheld, without reasons recorded in the communication the state has described in its pleadings. The state has carried the question to the Supreme Court in an original suit under Article 131, contending that an unexplained withholding of assent, on the advice of the Union government whose statute the Bill sought to displace, empties Article 254(2) of content; the suit raises the federal question in its purest available form and remains undecided. The durable legal position, stripped of the politics, is threefold. The exemption a state seeks in this field cannot be achieved by state legislation alone, because the test rests on a central statute characterised as a standards measure. The only legislative route is assent under Article 254(2). And assent, when the Bill’s whole purpose is to displace a central policy, is decided by the President acting on the advice of the Union Council of Ministers, which is to say by the government whose policy is being displaced. The door exists; the key hangs inside the house it opens against.

Worked field three: vice chancellors, chancellors, and the assent wall

If the entrance test is the standards technique at the gate of a profession, the vice chancellor question is the standards technique at the head of the institution, and it has produced the sharpest litigation of the concurrent era. State university Acts, enacted under the states’ incorporation power, provide for the appointment of the vice chancellor by the chancellor, ordinarily the Governor, from a panel recommended by a search committee whose composition the state Act prescribes. The University Grants Commission Regulations of 2018, made under the Commission’s standards power, prescribe their own composition for the search committee and require that the vice chancellor be appointed from a panel of three to five names the committee recommends. Where the two texts differ, a vice chancellor appointed under the state text is appointed under a procedure the central regulations do not recognise, and the courts were asked which text governs.

What did the Supreme Court decide in the 2022 vice chancellor cases?

The Court held in 2022 that the University Grants Commission Regulations prevail over an inconsistent state university Act, and that a vice chancellor appointed in breach of them holds office under a void appointment, quashing the appointments in both the cases before it.

In Gambhirdan K. Gadhvi v State of Gujarat, in March 2022, and in Professor (Dr) Sreejith P.S. v Dr Rajasree M.S., in October 2022, appointments were quashed because the search committees had not produced the panel the regulations require, in the second case recommending a single name; the state provisions were treated as repugnant to the regulations and the appointments as void from the beginning.

The immediate sequel in Kerala showed how far the doctrine reaches into a working system. Following the judgment in the Sreejith case, the Governor of Kerala, acting as chancellor, called upon the vice chancellors of a series of the state’s other universities to resign, on the ground that their appointments had been made in the same manner the Court had condemned, and the state was for a period governed in its higher education by acting arrangements and litigation over the demand itself. Whatever view is taken of the demand’s merits, the episode established the practical proposition that a single doctrinal ruling on the character of a search committee can unsettle the leadership of an entire state university system at a stroke, a consequence no state legislature voted for and no state electorate could reverse at an election. It is episodes of this kind, more than the text of any regulation, that converted the states’ objection from a lawyer’s argument about entries into a political programme carried by governments of opposed parties in different regions, and that produced the coordinated response, the assembly resolutions and the Bengaluru conclave, described in the next section.

The reasoning deserves scrutiny, because the objection to it is the strongest doctrinal objection the states possess in this entire field. Article 254 speaks of repugnancy between laws made by legislatures. The UGC Regulations are delegated legislation, made by a commission under a central Act, and a line of academic and editorial criticism, voiced prominently in The Hindu’s editorial comment on the two judgments in November 2022, holds that to treat a regulator’s regulations as overriding a state legislature’s Act, through a doctrine framed for conflicts between statutes, is to let the tail of delegated legislation wag two legislatures at once. The defenders of the judgments answer that regulations made under a parliamentary Act carry the force of that Act, that the Act itself rests on the Union’s standards power, and that a state Act prescribing a weaker selection procedure is, in substance, determining a standard for the head of a university by another name. The reader should see the structure plainly: the judgments are defensible on the hierarchy of entries, since the standards power is exclusive to the Union, and vulnerable on the hierarchy of instruments, since the norm doing the overriding was written by an unelected commission. Both propositions are true at once, and the tension between them is the vice chancellor dispute in miniature.

The political system responded at the point the states still control, which is the text of their own university Acts, and there it met the second wall, the assent wall. The office of chancellor of a state university is held, under most state university Acts, by the Governor of the state by virtue of that office. Several legislatures have passed bills to change that settlement. West Bengal’s Assembly in June 2022 passed the West Bengal University Laws (Amendment) Bill, 2022, with companion bills for particular universities, substituting the Chief Minister for the Governor as chancellor of the state-aided universities. The bills were withheld in the Raj Bhavan and then, in April 2024, reserved by Governor C. V. Ananda Bose for the consideration of the President; the state government was informed in December 2025 that the President had withheld assent, so the Governor continues as chancellor and the principal Acts stand unamended. Kerala’s University Laws (Amendment) Bill of 2022, directed at the chancellor’s control over the search committee process, was reserved for the President and has not become law. Punjab’s Universities Laws (Amendment) Bill of 2023, which proposed the Chief Minister as chancellor, met the same reservation. Tamil Nadu’s legislature passed a series of bills in 2022 transferring the power to appoint vice chancellors from the Governor to the state government, and those bills became the subject of the state’s litigation over gubernatorial delay, in which a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court in State of Tamil Nadu v Governor of Tamil Nadu, in April 2025, prescribed timelines for assent and treated ten long-pending bills, university bills among them, as deemed to have been assented to. That device did not survive the year. On a reference by the President under Article 143, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court advised on 20 November 2025 that courts cannot prescribe timelines for a Governor or the President in the assent process and that deemed assent is a concept foreign to the constitutional text, while holding at the same time that a Governor may not sit on a bill indefinitely and that unreasonable inaction is open to a limited judicial review directed at the failure to decide rather than at the decision. The consequence for education bills is the consequence this article is required to state and no further: a state bill that a Governor reserves, or that the President declines, has no judicially manufactured route into law, and the state’s remedies are political pressure, a fresh bill, or a challenge aimed at the delay rather than the outcome. The assent litigation as a whole is owned elsewhere in this series; here it is enough that the education bills of four states have struck the same wall, and the wall is part of the constitutional machinery of the concurrent field and not an accident of personalities.

Running beneath the litigation is a question of institutional design that the brief for this dispute poses directly and that deserves a direct statement. The chancellor of a state university is, under the standard state Act, an officer who is not accountable to the state legislature, who holds the office by virtue of a Union-appointed office, and whose powers under the Act include appointing the vice chancellor, presiding over the court and, in several Acts, annulling proceedings of the university’s own authorities. The state legislature created the university, votes its funds and answers to its electorate for the condition of higher education in the state, yet the head of the institution is chosen through a process the legislature does not control. The Union’s answer is that the Governor as chancellor is a deliberate insulation of the university from the state executive of the day, that the chancellor’s statutory role is a check on precisely the political appointment-making the states are accused of seeking, and that the remedy for a chancellor who abuses the process is the judicial review the courts have exercised, not the transfer of the office to the head of the government whose nominees the process exists to filter. Both accounts describe the same office accurately. They differ on whether insulation from the state executive is a safeguard of the university or a denial of the state’s democratic title to govern what it funds, and that difference is a value judgment laid over the legal text, not a disagreement the text can resolve.

Worked field four: the National Education Policy and the politics of implementation

The National Education Policy, approved by the Union Cabinet on 29 July 2020, is the field on which the limits of the Union’s legal power are most clearly visible, because the policy is not a law. It binds no state, creates no offence, prescribes no enforceable standard, and a state government that declines to adopt it breaks no legal obligation by the declinature. The friction the policy has generated is therefore conducted through the instruments the Union does control: the conditions of its schemes, the architecture of its regulators, and the drafting of its bills. Three disputes show the instruments at work.

The first is the three-language formula. The policy continues the formula under which children learn three languages, with the choice of languages left to states, regions and students and with an express statement that no language will be imposed on any state. Tamil Nadu, which has followed a two-language policy of Tamil and English since 1968, read the formula’s implementation through the centrally sponsored school programme as the re-entry of compulsory Hindi by a side door, and declined to sign the memorandum of understanding for the PM SHRI schools scheme, under which selected schools are developed as exemplars of the policy. The Union withheld the state’s share of funds under the Samagra Shiksha programme, the integrated school education scheme funded sixty to forty between the Centre and the state. The state government quantified the withheld central share at Rs 2,152 crore, and the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. K. Stalin, sought its release on the ground that Samagra Shiksha funds a statutory school system and cannot lawfully be conditioned on adopting a policy the state has rejected. The Union Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, stated the Centre’s position in Parliament and in public comment: the funds are released against the scheme’s terms, the policy asks no state to impose any language, and a state that wants the Centre’s money for the Centre’s programme must accept the programme’s framework. Tamil Nadu carried the dispute to the Supreme Court in an original suit under Article 131 in 2025, pleading that the linkage of statutory education funding to policy adoption coerces the state’s legislative choice under Entry 25 of the Concurrent List; the suit awaits decision. Maharashtra shows the same formula meeting resistance inside a state governed by the Union’s own alliance: the state government by resolutions in April and June 2025 made Hindi the compulsory third language in the early classes of state board schools, met statewide protest led by the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and the Shiv Sena (UBT) and joined by voices within the ruling coalition, and revoked both resolutions within the same June, appointing a committee under the economist Dr Narendra Jadhav to report on the language policy. The legal moral of both episodes is the same. Language in schools lies in the concurrent field and in the states’ hands in practice; a national policy can propose, fund and exhort, and it cannot command, and when it appears to command the resistance is constitutional in form even where it is cultural in feeling.

The second dispute is the regulator. In January 2025 the University Grants Commission released draft regulations on the appointment and promotion of teachers and academic staff, intended to replace the regulations of 2018, which placed the constitution of vice chancellor search committees wholly with the chancellor and opened the vice chancellorship to distinguished persons from outside academic life. On 6 January 2025 the draft was released for public consultation, a date recorded in the pillar article on the Commission in this series, and the response organised itself federally. The legislatures of Tamil Nadu and Kerala adopted resolutions calling for the draft’s withdrawal. On 5 February 2025 the higher education ministers of six states, Karnataka, Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand, meeting at a conclave in Bengaluru hosted by Karnataka’s Minister for Higher Education, Dr M. C. Sudhakar, adopted a fifteen-point resolution demanding that the draft be withdrawn and that regulations touching state universities be framed with the states at the table. The Union Minister of Education presented the draft as a reform of flexibility and inclusion in academic appointments, and the Commission’s chairperson defended the wider eligibility for vice chancellors as a way of bringing administrative and professional distinction into university leadership. The states’ objection went to the root of this article’s subject: the draft was, in their reading, the standards power being used to settle who governs, which is the one thing they maintain it may not do. Behind the draft stands the larger redesign the policy proposes, a single regulator for higher education in place of the existing commissions, attempted first in the draft Higher Education Commission of India Bill of 2018, which was released for comment and never introduced, and carried forward in the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, approved by the Union Cabinet on 12 December 2025 and introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025, which remains a bill and not a law.

The third dispute is quieter and, for the federal structure, the most instructive: the accumulation of national instruments that no state voted on. A national curriculum framework prepared by the national council for educational research frames the syllabuses state boards adopt or adapt. A national credit framework assigns levels to school, higher and vocational qualifications so that movement between them is administratively possible. A national entrance architecture sets the tests through which professional admissions run. Each instrument is lawful, resting on the standards entry, the spending power or the concurrent power, and none requires a state legislature to sit. The states’ complaint is not that any one instrument exceeds the Union’s competence; it is that the sum of the instruments relocates the government of education without any single decision that a legislature, state or Union, ever took in those terms. The Union’s answer is equally structural: a national labour market already treats qualifications as national, employers and universities in every state rely on the comparability the instruments produce, and the comparability is the standard the Constitution assigned to the Union to determine. The instruments dispute is therefore the characterisation dispute at system scale, and it will not be settled by litigation, because no single instrument presents a court with the whole of it.

The teacher question: a regulator for the classroom

Teacher education is the field in which the transfer’s consequences are easiest to trace in a single line, because before 1976 the training of teachers was unambiguously state business and within two decades it had acquired a central statutory regulator. The National Council for Teacher Education began as an advisory body in 1973, a creature of executive resolution without power to bind anyone. Parliament gave it statutory form in the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993, resting on the concurrent power the transfer had created, and charged it with the planned and co-ordinated development of teacher education and the determination and maintenance of its standards, including the recognition of institutions offering teacher training and the power to withdraw recognition from those that fall short. The institutional history belongs to the pillar article on that Act in this series; the federalism point is the completeness of the relocation. A subject the states had governed through their own training colleges, their own syllabuses and their own service rules acquired, by one central statute, a national gatekeeper for the institutions that produce the states’ teachers, and the states’ objections at the time rehearsed, in miniature, every argument this article has recorded: that the Council’s norms were framed for an ideal institution and bore hardest on the states with the weakest training infrastructure, and that a recognition regime administered from Delhi would close colleges in the districts that needed teachers most. The sequel is also representative. The Council’s recognition regime became the subject of sustained criticism for licence-raj failings of its own, and the reform debate that followed was conducted as a debate about the design of the central regulator, not about returning the subject to the states, because by then the premise of a national floor for teacher qualification had been absorbed into the structure and the argument had moved, as it always moves in this field, from whether the centre should set the standard to how the standard should be set and by whom.

The classroom end of the same field shows the two levels interlocking rather than colliding. Under Section 23 of the Right to Education Act, the minimum qualifications for a school teacher are those laid down by the academic authority the Central Government authorises, and the authority designated is the Council. Eligibility is then tested by teacher eligibility tests conducted both by the Centre, for its own schools and as a facility others use, and by the states for theirs, on guidelines the Council frames. Appointment, posting, pay, discipline and transfer remain with the states and their managements. The arrangement is the concurrent system in its most functional form, a national floor, a shared test architecture and state employment, and it works without litigation precisely because the characterisation questions were answered in the statute itself rather than left to be fought over measure by measure. It stands in this article as the control case against which the contested fields can be measured: where Parliament has legislated the boundary into the text, as it did in the teacher provisions of the Right to Education Act, the boundary holds; where the boundary has been left to be inferred from entries and regulations, as in the appointment of vice chancellors, it does not.

The space the states actually hold

A survey that ended with the disputes would misdescribe the system, because the greater part of Indian education is governed by the states every day without any dispute at all, and the map of state power in ordinary operation is the necessary background to the boundary quarrels. The states run the school systems: they prescribe the syllabuses of their boards, print the textbooks, appoint and transfer the teachers, fix the academic calendar and conduct the board examinations through their own boards of secondary education, which exist alongside the central boards and educate far more children than the central boards do. The states conduct their own eligibility tests for school teachers within the national qualification floor, set the language policy of their schools subject to the rights limits described below, and determine the reservation policy that governs admissions to their institutions within the constitutional ceiling. In higher education, every state university functions under a state Act whose internal architecture, the composition of its court and executive council, the statutes and ordinances it frames for itself, the colleges it affiliates and the examinations it conducts, is state law in daily operation, supervised at the points of standards by the central regulators but not replaced by them. When Prof. Yashpal struck down Chhattisgarh’s device of mass university creation, the state’s response was not exit but reconstruction: a successor statute of 2005 rebuilt the private university framework under a state regulatory commission, with the standards discipline the judgment had demanded written into the state’s own law. The episode is the healthy form of the concurrent system, a judicial correction absorbed into state legislation, and it is a reminder that the states’ legislative capacity in this field is not vestigial. It is the operating system on which the Union’s standards layer runs.

The states also legislate, without challenge, across the wide middle of the subject that no central instrument occupies: the recognition and grant-in-aid codes for private schools, the service conditions of teachers in state employment, the establishment of state universities of every specialised kind, agricultural, law, health sciences, technical and open universities, each by its own Act, the regulation of coaching and of private tuition in some states, and the fee structures of state institutions. The federalism of Indian education, measured by the volume of law in force, is a state system with a central standards layer and a central fiscal contribution, and the political argument is conducted almost entirely about the layer, because the layer is where the growth has been. That distribution also explains the asymmetry of the two sides’ rhetoric. The Union speaks of standards because standards are what it makes; the states speak of institutions because institutions are what they run; and each side’s description of the whole system is a faithful report of the part of it that side inhabits.

Worked field five: where rights, not entries, draw the line

Not every limit on state power over education comes from the Union List, and a federalism article that ignored the fundamental rights would mislead its reader about where state action actually fails. The medium of instruction cases make the point. In State of Karnataka v Associated Management of Primary and Secondary Schools, decided by a Constitution Bench in 2014, the Supreme Court struck down Karnataka’s policy of imposing the mother tongue or Kannada as the compulsory medium of instruction in primary schools, holding that the choice of the medium for a child belongs, within the rights framework, to the parent and the child, and that the state’s undoubted power over its schools does not extend to compelling the medium in schools beyond its own. The limit there was Article 19 and the rights of the citizen, not Entry 66, and the case stands for a proposition the states themselves invoke in other fields: the government closest to the school is still a government under a constitution. Minority institutions carry the complementary limit. Article 30 protects the right of religious and linguistic minorities to establish and administer institutions of their choice, and from St. Stephen’s College v University of Delhi through the TMA Pai line, the Court has balanced that protection against the university’s and the regulator’s standards, permitting the minority institution a protected preference in admissions for its own community while holding it to the common standards of qualification and merit. The federal map and the rights map are different maps, and a contested measure in this field must be plotted on both: a state rule may survive Entry 66 and fall to Article 30, and a central regulation may be impeccable under the lists and still have to answer for its effect on the rights of institutions and parents. The reservation field shows the two maps interacting through amendment. When P. A. Inamdar held that the state could not impose its reservation policy on unaided non-minority institutions, Parliament answered not under the lists but by amending the rights chapter itself, inserting clause (5) in Article 15 by the Constitution (Ninety-third Amendment) Act, 2005, to enable the state to make special provision for the advancement of socially and educationally backward classes in aided and unaided institutions other than minority institutions. The episode belongs in this article because it demonstrates the third dimension of the whole subject: where the boundary between the levels of government is fixed by a right, the political system moves the right, and the federal argument resumes on the new ground.

The two cases, stated at full strength

The stance this subject requires is not a balance of courtesies; it is the recognition that each side’s case is built on a fact the other side does not dispute. The Union case begins from the qualification itself. A degree is a national instrument: its holder presents it to employers, universities and licensing bodies in every state, and its value depends on strangers being able to trust that it certifies a comparable attainment wherever it was earned. The Union Minister of Education, Dharmendra Pradhan, has put the government’s version of the case in the defence of the single entrance test and of the draft regulations of 2025: one national test ends the multiplicity of examinations through which wealthy families bought repeated chances, national standards protect the student from the weakest state system rather than the strongest, and a qualification regime that varies by state would tax precisely the students who must migrate for work. The equality limb of the case is genuine. Without a central floor, the standard of a public qualification would be set, in practice, by the state least able to fund its system, and the students of that state would carry the discount into every national competition. The case extends to research and mobility: co-ordination across institutions, the credit transfer the national frameworks make possible, is something no single state can supply for the others, and Entry 66’s first verb, co-ordination, exists because the framers saw that a federation of universities requires a coordinator none of the members can be.

The state case begins from the institutions. The states establish the overwhelming majority of India’s universities and colleges through their own Acts, vote the overwhelming share of public money spent on them, employ their teachers, and answer to their electorates for the buildings, the vacancies and the examination calendar. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. K. Stalin, has stated the state’s version across the entrance test and funding disputes: education was taken into the Concurrent List by an Emergency amendment ratified by legislatures sitting under Emergency conditions, a state that funds a university system cannot be a stranger to the appointment of those who lead it, and a Union that conditions school funds on the adoption of its policy converts a financial partnership into an instrument of legislative coercion. Karnataka’s Minister for Higher Education, Dr M. C. Sudhakar, put the institutional limb at the Bengaluru conclave: matters such as the appointment of vice chancellors and the administration of public universities are, in the states’ reading, governance, and governance of state institutions by a central regulator’s regulations, framed without the states at the table, restrains the constitutional duties the states carry. Kerala’s Chief Minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, and its Minister for Higher Education, Dr R. Bindu, have carried the same case into the state’s legislative resolutions. The democratic limb of the state case is as genuine as the Union’s equality limb: a decision about who leads a university in Thiruvananthapuram or Kolkata is taken, under the prevailing doctrine, by a commission in Delhi whose members the state did not choose, applying regulations the state’s legislature cannot amend, and the accountability for the outcome lands on a government that was excluded from the decision.

Each side also carries an evidence claim, and the two claims should be separated from the constitutional argument because they would matter even if the entries were rewritten tomorrow. The Union’s evidence claim is that central determination has suppressed the worst market failures of a fragmented system. Its strongest exhibit is the record the Supreme Court built in the Pai and Inamdar litigation itself, of professional seats sold for capitation payments beyond any published fee, of multiple entrance examinations run as revenue devices, and of state-level processes that varied from the rigorous to the purchasable; the single test and the supervised fee committee are answers to documented abuses, not abstractions, and the ministers who defend them, the Union Minister of Education among them, speak of a market in seats that state autonomy left unpoliced. The states’ evidence claim is that the regulation the centre supplies measures the inputs of education rather than its outcomes, and produces uniformity of paperwork without quality of learning: qualifications counted, infrastructure norms inspected, performance indicators scored, while the learning levels of children in the state systems, measured year after year by the Annual Status of Education Report surveys conducted by the organisation Pratham, have remained the standing reproach of the whole structure, central standards and state administration together. The states’ version of the claim, made by ministers including those who met at Bengaluru, is that a regulator which can prescribe the composition of a search committee in Kerala cannot show a corresponding instrument for the classroom failure in its own exemplar institutions, and that the standards power has been exercised most energetically exactly where it is most visible politically and least where it is most needed educationally. Both evidence claims are partly true, and they are not in contradiction: a system can suppress a market in seats and still fail to teach, and the federal argument persists partly because each side’s evidence is drawn from the half of the record the other side administers.

A verdict is available on parts of this, and this article takes it. On the law as it stands, the Union’s position is the stronger wherever the contested measure is honestly describable as fixing what a qualification certifies, because the text of Entry 66 is exclusive, unqualified by any requirement of state concurrence, and confirmed by an unbroken line of authority from 1963 to 2022. On the assent question, the states’ structural complaint is the stronger as a description of how the machinery works, whatever its legal merit: the Article 254(2) route and the treatment of reserved bills place the fate of state education legislation in the hands of the Union executive, and the outcomes recorded in this article, an exemption bill refused without stated reasons, chancellor bills refused after years in abeyance, are the predictable operation of that design rather than its abuse. On the question the whole dispute finally turns on, whether the appointment of the head of a state university is a standard or an act of administration, the article’s judgment is that the honest answer is that it is both, and that a doctrine which resolves a genuinely double-charactered act by characterising it once, in favour of whichever level’s instrument is challenged second, will reproduce this litigation for as long as the characterisation is doing the work a settlement ought to do. The boundary has never stabilised because the text locates it in a description, and descriptions can be argued either way by competent lawyers in good faith. What can be said without taking a side is that the present settlement gives the Union the law and the states the institutions, and that a federation in which those two are held by different hands will argue about the join indefinitely. Readers assembling their own record of the dispute, the texts of the state bills, the regulations, the judgments and the resolutions, as it develops, can keep that record as a private research file in an encrypted workspace built for source material and notes on VaultBook, which is the natural companion to a controversy conducted, as this one is, through documents. The general position described in this article is legal information drawn from the constitutional text and the public record; it is not advice on any individual matter, and anyone advising on a live appointment, admission or bill should work from the current text of the governing Act and regulations.

The reform arguments and the shape of a settlement

The reform debate divides into those who would move the boundary and those who would discipline the process by which it is policed. The movement demand is the oldest: return education to the State List. Its advocates, state governments led in this generation by Tamil Nadu and the state-appointed commissions in the Rajamannar tradition, argue that the transfer was an Emergency measure never ratified in normal conditions and that proximity is a constitutional value, since the government closest to a school knows its language, its labour market and its failures. The obstacles are stated in the section on the Forty-fourth Amendment above and have not weakened with time: reversal needs an Article 368 amendment with ratification by half the states, a Union government willing to surrender the foundation of its regulators and its flagship statutes, and an answer to the equality argument, which no advocate of return has yet supplied in a form that survives the question of what a degree from the weakest system would be worth. The Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions, the two authoritative Centre-state reviews, both stopped short of recommending return and recommended discipline instead: prior consultation before Union legislation on concurrent subjects, active use of the Inter-State Council and the Central Advisory Board of Education, and Union self-restraint in occupying a concurrent field beyond what uniformity requires.

The process by which national policy itself is made sits inside the same complaint, and the making of the National Education Policy 2020 is the standard exhibit. The policy was prepared by a committee chaired by Dr K. Kasturirangan, whose draft was published for comment in 2019, and the policy as adopted by the Union Cabinet in July 2020 was not enacted by Parliament, debated into a statute, or voted on by any state legislature, although it proposes changes to the structure of schooling, the architecture of regulation and the language formula in every state system. The Union’s answer is that a policy is not a law, that consultation on the draft was extensive, and that implementation remains voluntary state by state, which the Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu episodes in their different ways confirm. The states’ answer is that a document which reorganises the terms on which funds flow, regulators draft and examinations are framed does not need to be a law to govern, and that the federal etiquette of the subject, the consultation the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions counselled, was observed in the drafting and not in the adoption. The reader does not need to choose between those answers to learn from the episode. It demonstrates that in the concurrent field the most consequential national decisions may be taken in the one forum, the Union executive, where the states have no seat at all, and that the entries, which allocate legislative power with such care, say nothing about that forum, because when they were written the executive policy document was not yet the governing instrument it has become.

The discipline proposals that recur in the debate, and that require no amendment, are worth stating as a set because they define what a negotiated settlement would look like. Consultation before regulation: the states’ Bengaluru resolution demanded that regulations touching state universities be framed with state participation, and the demand has a statutory logic, since the regulators’ governing bodies could carry state nominees without any change to Entry 66. Assent with reasons and within a practice of decision: the Tamil Nadu suit over the entrance test bill asks, in effect, for the withholding of assent to be a reasoned act, and whatever its fate in court, the demand identifies the point at which the machinery’s legitimacy is thinnest. Fiscal honesty in concurrent statutes: a ratio written into a statute, as the Right to Education Act declines to do, would convert the funding argument from an annual negotiation into a legal term both sides could plan against. Characterisation by legislation: Parliament could, if it chose, define by statute which aspects of university governance it claims as standards and which it leaves to the incorporating legislatures, converting a judge-made boundary into a legislated one that states could contest politically rather than only forensically. None of these requires the lists to change. All of them require the level of government that holds the legal advantage to spend some of it on the legitimacy of the arrangement, and the history of the field since 1976 suggests that is the expenditure least often made.

The closing verdict of the federalism framework, applied to this subject, is the one the series thesis predicts. Asked who may act on education in India, the Constitution answers: both, in layers, with the Union holding the reserved core. Asked what happens when both act, it answers: the act that can be characterised as a standard prevails, the act characterised as administration survives beneath it, and a state act that can be neither must travel the assent road to Delhi and take its chances. A reader who holds those two answers, and who can run any new dispute, a regulation, a bill, a test, a language formula, through the three questions of entry, characterisation and assent, holds the whole of this subject in working form. The method can be shown working on a dispute that has not yet been decided, which is the test of whether a reader has hold of the subject. Suppose a state legislature, alarmed by the cost of private professional education, enacts a law fixing the fees of every private medical college in the state and reserving a share of its seats for the state’s own students at the fixed fee. Run the measure through the three questions. The entry question answers itself in the state’s favour at first sight: admissions and fees in private institutions were the states’ ground in the Pai and Inamdar settlement, and fee fixation through a supervised committee was upheld in Modern Dental College, so the measure’s pith and substance is regulation of admission and fee, squarely within the concurrent field and the state’s regulatory power. The characterisation question then does its work, because the Union’s answer writes itself: a fee fixed without reference to the institution’s costs operates on the viability of the institution and therefore on the standard of the education it can deliver, and a seat reservation that lowers the effective merit threshold operates on the standard of entry the national test determines. The court hearing the challenge would not ask whether fees are a state subject in the abstract; it would ask whether this fee law, in its actual operation, leaves the central standard intact, and the answer would turn on the fixation machinery and the merit floor the law preserves. If the law falls, it falls at the characterisation stage; if it is recast to survive, with a committee, a cost basis and the national merit list untouched, the state has no need of the third question at all. If instead the law were framed to displace the national merit list itself, the assent question would govern, and the bill’s fate would be decided not in a court but in the correspondence between the Raj Bhavan, the Union ministries and the President, on the record of the last decade. Every actor in the system understands this sequence, which is why so much of the real negotiation in education federalism happens before anything is enacted, in the drafting choices that decide in advance which of the three questions a measure will have to answer.

The disputes will continue to arrive. They will arrive, as they have arrived for fifty years, dressed as quarrels about education. They are quarrels about the boundary, and the boundary is a sentence in the Seventh Schedule that two levels of government will go on reading differently, because the sentence was written to be read from both ends.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why is education on the Concurrent List?

Education was placed on the Concurrent List by the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, on the recommendation of the Swaran Singh Committee, which advised that the subject be made concurrent so that all-India policies could be framed on it. Before the amendment, education was Entry 11 of the State List and the state legislatures held the general field, subject to the Union entries on particular institutions and on standards. The amendment omitted the State List entry and substituted Entry 25 of the Concurrent List with the wide education entry, in force from 3 January 1977. The stated purpose was national coherence in a subject every state administers; the practical consequence is that both Parliament and the state legislatures may legislate on education, with the central law prevailing on a conflict.

Q: What does Entry 66 of the Union List allow?

Entry 66 of the Union List gives Parliament exclusive power over the co-ordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions. The power is not confined to advice or to institutions the Union funds. The University Grants Commission Act, 1956 rests on it, as do the technical and teacher education regulators in their standards functions, and the Supreme Court has read it to cover the prescription of minimum qualifications for teachers, the standards for admission to professional courses, and the procedure guaranteeing that the head of a university is selected to a national pattern. A state law or a state university Act that operates on a matter characterised as a standard must yield to a central measure under the entry, whatever the state’s own competence over the institution.

Q: Can a state education law be overridden by a central law?

Yes, where the two laws conflict on a concurrent subject and the conflict cannot be resolved by reading them together. Article 254(1) provides that the law made by Parliament prevails and the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy. The exception is Article 254(2): a state law on a concurrent subject that was reserved for the consideration of the President and received assent prevails in that state notwithstanding the repugnancy, as the Supreme Court confirmed in M. Karunanidhi v Union of India. The exception is itself qualified, because Parliament may legislate again on the same matter and its later law prevails over the assented state law, the point decided in Zaverbhai Amaidas v State of Bombay. Overriding is therefore a question of sequence and assent, not merely of subject.

Q: Who controls admissions to private colleges?

Control is divided. An unaided private college, minority or non-minority, holds a right under the line of authority from TMA Pai Foundation v State of Karnataka to establish and administer the institution, which includes admitting students of its choice from among those who meet the prescribed standards, through a fair and merit-based process. The state may regulate admissions to prevent profiteering and capitation and to secure fairness, and in Modern Dental College v State of Madhya Pradesh the Supreme Court upheld a state statute regulating admissions and fees in unaided professional colleges. What neither the institution nor the state may do is dilute the minimum eligibility that the central regulator prescribes under the standards power. For medicine, admission runs exclusively through the national entrance test, and the college’s choice operates only within the counselling structure built on that test’s merit list.

Q: Why do states object to central regulation of universities?

The states’ objection is jurisdictional before it is educational. States create their universities by their own Acts under Entry 32 of the State List, fund the great majority of them from state budgets, and answer to their electorates for their condition, yet the operative rules on teacher qualifications, degree standards and the selection of vice chancellors are made by central regulators in whose appointment the states have no share. The objection sharpened when the Supreme Court held, in the vice chancellor cases of 2022, that University Grants Commission regulations prevail over state university Acts, because the instrument overriding a state legislature’s Act was a regulation framed by an unelected commission. The states do not dispute that national standards exist; they dispute that every rule a regulator chooses to make is a standard rather than a decision about the government of institutions they own.

Q: Can a state exempt itself from a national entrance test?

Not by its own legislation acting alone. Where the test rests on a central statute, as the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test rests on the National Medical Commission Act, 2019, a state law departing from it is repugnant and void unless it travels the route of Article 254(2): reservation for the President and assent, which makes the state law prevail within the state. Tamil Nadu used that route for its Admission to Undergraduate Medical Degree Courses Bill, 2021, and assent was withheld, so the exemption never took effect. The state had succeeded with the same route in 2006, when its law abolishing the state entrance test received assent and governed admissions for a decade. Exemption is therefore constitutionally possible and practically dependent on a decision taken by the President on the advice of the Union government.

Q: Who is the chancellor of a state university?

Under most state university Acts, the Governor of the state is the chancellor of each state university by virtue of the office of Governor. The chancellor is the head of the university in its statutory scheme, presides over its court or senate and its convocations, and appoints the vice chancellor from the panel a search committee recommends. The office is a creature of the state Act that creates the university, so a state legislature may in principle amend its Act to vest the chancellorship elsewhere, and several legislatures have passed bills substituting the Chief Minister. Such bills have repeatedly been reserved for the President or denied assent, as West Bengal’s were, so in the universities of most states the Governor remains chancellor and the question is contested in practice rather than in text.

Q: What happens when a state education bill is not assented to?

A bill that is not assented to does not become law, and the pre-existing legal position continues unchanged. Where a Governor withholds assent and returns a bill, the legislature may pass it again and present it afresh; where a Governor reserves a bill for the President, the President may assent, withhold assent, or return it for reconsideration, and withholding ends the bill’s progress unless the legislature begins again. The Supreme Court’s advisory opinion of November 2025 on the President’s reference held that courts cannot impose timelines on the assent process or treat a bill as deemed assented, while accepting that indefinite inaction is open to limited judicial review. For education bills the practical consequence has been that reserved bills on chancellors, vice chancellors and entrance tests have waited for years and then failed, leaving the state Acts they would have amended exactly as they were.

Q: What is the difference between Entry 25 of the Concurrent List and Entry 66 of the Union List?

Entry 25 is a shared power over the whole subject of education, exercisable by Parliament and by every state legislature, and it covers schools, colleges, universities and the training of labour. Entry 66 is an exclusive Union power over one function within that subject, the co-ordination and determination of standards in higher education, research and scientific and technical institutions. Entry 25 is expressly made subject to Entry 66, so the shared field operates only in the space the exclusive function leaves. The difference decides cases: a state measure administering its universities rests on Entry 25 and Entry 32 of the State List and is valid, while the same measure, characterised as determining a standard, falls within Entry 66 and must yield to the central measure. Almost every dispute in education federalism is an argument about which entry in substance describes the contested act.

Q: Why was education not returned to the State List by the 44th Amendment?

The Janata Party government that followed the Emergency proposed, in its amendment bill, to reverse several of the Forty-second Amendment’s transfers, including the restoration of education to the State List. The Rajya Sabha, where the Congress party retained the strength to block clauses, declined to accept a number of the bill’s provisions, and the restoration of education was among those that did not survive the bill’s passage. The Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978 therefore undid much of the Emergency settlement on emergency powers, property and the tenure of legislatures, while leaving the Seventh Schedule transfers untouched. No later government has renewed the attempt, and reversal would require an amendment altering the Seventh Schedule, ratified by the legislatures of not less than half the states under the proviso to Article 368.

Q: Does Entry 25 let Parliament make laws for school education or only for universities?

Entry 25 covers education without internal limit, and Parliament’s concurrent power extends to school education in full. The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 is the working proof: a parliamentary statute prescribing the norms of the neighbourhood school, the duties of teachers, the reservation of seats in private schools and the responsibilities of governments for children between six and fourteen, operating in every state. Before 1976 Parliament could not have enacted such a statute, because school education lay in the State List subject only to the Union’s standards and institutions entries, and its interventions were financial and advisory. The states retain the same concurrent power and continue to run the school systems, prescribe the state board syllabuses and employ the teachers, so school education is governed by both levels at once, with the central statute prevailing on any direct conflict.

Q: How did Tamil Nadu try to use Article 254(2) to escape NEET, and what happened to its bill?

Tamil Nadu enacted the Tamil Nadu Admission to Undergraduate Medical Degree Courses Bill, 2021, proposing admission to medical courses on Class XII marks with normalisation instead of the national entrance test, following the report of the committee under Justice A. K. Rajan that the test disadvantaged state board, rural and poorer students. Because the Bill conflicted with the central statute mandating the test, it could prevail in the state only if reserved for the President and assented to under Article 254(2). The Governor returned the Bill; the Assembly re-adopted it in February 2022; the Governor then reserved it for the President. In March 2025 the state was informed that assent had been withheld. Tamil Nadu has challenged the withholding in an original suit in the Supreme Court, which remains undecided.

Q: Why do states argue that vice chancellor selection is administration and not a standard?

The states’ argument runs from the structure of a university. A vice chancellor is the chief executive of an institution the state incorporated, funds and is answerable for, and selecting the person who will run it is, in ordinary institutional language, an act of governance by the owner, comparable to appointing the head of any state body. The University Grants Commission Regulations of 2018, and the draft regulations of 2025, prescribe the composition of the search committee and confine the chancellor’s choice to a panel framed under them, which the states read as the regulator appointing by proxy. Their supporting point is one of constitutional form: a matter is not converted into a standard merely because a regulator’s regulation deals with it, and if appointment is a standard, the states ask what act of university government would not be. The Supreme Court has nonetheless treated the prescribed procedure as within the standards power.

Q: What did six states demand at the Bengaluru conclave on the UGC draft regulations of 2025?

The higher education ministers of Karnataka, Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand, meeting at Bengaluru on 5 February 2025 at a conclave hosted by Karnataka’s Minister for Higher Education, Dr M. C. Sudhakar, adopted a fifteen-point resolution on the University Grants Commission’s draft regulations of 2025. The resolution demanded that the draft be withdrawn, that state governments be given a central role in the appointment of vice chancellors of state universities rather than the process being placed wholly with the chancellor, and that regulations affecting state universities be framed through consultation with the states. The ministers objected in particular to the draft’s treatment of search committees and to the opening of the vice chancellorship to persons from outside academic life. Tamil Nadu and Kerala had separately adopted legislative resolutions against the draft.

Q: Is the National Education Policy 2020 legally binding on a state that refuses to adopt it?

No. The National Education Policy is a policy approved by the Union Cabinet, not a statute, and it creates no legal obligation that a court could enforce against a state. A state that declines to adopt its three-language formula, its school complexes or its regulatory redesign breaks no law by declining. The Union’s leverage is financial and institutional rather than legal: centrally sponsored schemes are funded against the scheme’s terms, and Tamil Nadu’s refusal to sign the memorandum for the PM SHRI schools became the ground on which its Samagra Shiksha share was withheld, a linkage the state has challenged in the Supreme Court as coercion of its legislative choice. Elements of the policy acquire legal force only when enacted, as the single regulator proposal did in part when the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 was introduced in Parliament.

Q: Who fills the state quota of medical seats under NEET, and on what merit list?

The state quota, eighty-five per cent of seats in government medical colleges together with the seats in the state’s other colleges as the counselling scheme provides, is filled by the state’s own counselling authority. It works from the single national merit list produced by the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, so no candidate enters the state quota without qualifying in the national test, but it applies the state’s own reservation policy, domicile conditions and category structure in allotting the seats. The remaining fifteen per cent forms the all-India quota, filled through central counselling. The Supreme Court upheld the arrangement’s two halves in successive cases, sustaining state reservation for in-service candidates within the state quota in 2020 and reservation in the all-India quota itself in 2022, which confirms that the test is national while the distribution of seats remains substantially a state function.

Q: Can a state legislature replace the Governor as chancellor of its universities by its own law alone?

The chancellorship is created by the state university Act, so the legislature that enacted the Act may amend it, and several legislatures have passed bills substituting the Chief Minister for the Governor, West Bengal in 2022, Kerala in 2022 and Punjab in 2023 among them. The obstacle is not competence but the assent process. Bills of this character have been reserved by Governors for the consideration of the President, and the President withheld assent from West Bengal’s bills, with the result that the Governor continues as chancellor under the unamended Acts. A state legislature therefore holds the pen but not the final word: its amendment takes effect only if it survives a stage at which the Union executive advises the President, which is why the chancellor question is argued as a federal grievance and not merely drafted away.

Q: Who controls the school curriculum and textbooks in a state, the Centre or the state government?

In practice the state government controls the curriculum and textbooks of its own board schools, acting through its state council of educational research and training, and the national council’s curriculum frameworks operate as guidance that states adopt, adapt or decline. Section 29 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 assigns the curriculum and evaluation procedure to an academic authority the appropriate government notifies, which for state schools is the state’s own authority. The position reverses for schools affiliated to the central boards, which follow the national framework directly. Curriculum is therefore one of the fields where concurrency works in the states’ favour, which is why the contests over it, the three-language formula in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra among them, are fought through scheme conditions and policy pressure rather than through any central power to prescribe a state’s syllabus.

Q: Can a state prescribe teacher qualifications higher than the national minimum?

A state may prescribe qualifications above the national floor, provided the prescription does not operate to lower the standard the central authority has determined. The doctrine runs from the Constitution Bench decision in Preeti Srivastava, which treated the central prescription as the standard that state rules may not dilute, while leaving the states free to regulate consistently with it, and it is the working basis on which states add state eligibility tests, language requirements and subject conditions to the qualifications the National Council for Teacher Education or the University Grants Commission lays down. What a state may not do is appoint below the floor, or frame its own qualification in terms that conflict with the central regulation, in which case Article 254 and the standards entry combine to void the state prescription to the extent of the conflict. The floor is the Union’s; the space above it is shared.

Q: What would it take, legally, to move education back to the State List?

It would take a constitutional amendment under Article 368, passed by a special majority of each House of Parliament, altering the Seventh Schedule by restoring an education entry to the State List and recasting Entry 25 of the Concurrent List. Because the Seventh Schedule is among the matters listed in the proviso to Article 368, the amendment would also require ratification by the legislatures of not less than half the states before the President’s assent. No lesser instrument can do it: an ordinary Act of Parliament cannot amend the lists, a state resolution cannot bind Parliament, and a judicial decision cannot rewrite an entry. The political conditions match the legal ones in difficulty, since the Union government of the day would be surrendering the foundation of its education statutes and regulators, which is why the demand has been voiced for fifty years and never carried.