JPC on higher education Bill to interact with UGC, AICTE, NCTE officials this week

The Joint Committee of Parliament examining the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, which seeks to replace UGC, AICTE, and NCTE with a single regulatory body, is scheduled to interact with officials of all three regulatory authorities this week.

Opinion | A Bill that reimagines higher education regulation

The 31-member Joint Committee, headed by Bharatiya Janata Party MP D. Purandeswari, is scheduled to meet this week on Wednesday (March 11, 2026) and Thursday (March 12, 2026), for its second and third sittings, during which these interactions are expected to take place, in the presence of officials from the Ministries of Education and Law.

Significantly, the University Grants Commission, the body the VBSA Bill seeks to replace, has not had a full-time Chairperson since April last year, when then Chairperson M. Jagadesh Kumar retired. As of now, the Secretary of the Department of Higher Education under the Education Ministry, Vineet Joshi, holds additional charge of the position. Mr. Joshi is also represented in the UGC in his official capacity as the Higher Education Secretary. The UGC website also does not list a Vice-Chairperson.

The first meeting of the joint committee examining the Bill was held on February 26, during which officials of the Education Ministry and Law Ministry briefed members on the circumstances under which the Bill was introduced in the 2025 Winter Session of Parliament. The officials made a presentation at this meeting, which showed the outline of the new regulatory structure as proposed in the Bill.

The Bill was introduced as a measure to “overhaul the regulatory framework” of higher education in India. It is meant to establish a 12-member Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan as an umbrella commission, under which regulatory (viniyaman), accreditation (gunvatta), and standards (manak) councils will operate.

The Bill seeks to subsume the functions of the UGC, the All India Council for Technical Education, and the National Council for Teacher Education, and repeal the laws through which these bodies were set up. The VBSA Bill also notably divorces the function of grants disbursal from the regulatory authority, with government officials saying that grants disbursal mechanisms will be designed by the Ministry in due time.

While the interaction with representatives of the UGC has been scheduled for Wednesday (March 11), along with representatives from the Council of Architecture, the interaction with the AICTE and NCTE has been fixed for the next day.

Even as the Bill was introduced, Opposition parties opposed it, arguing that the Bill represented “executive overreach”, subjected higher educational institutes to “pervasive executive control, graded autonomy, intrusive compliance requirements, severe penalties, and closure powers”, and went against the principles of federalism.

In their first presentation to the joint committee looking at the Bill, government officials have submitted that the National Education Policy (NEP) had been drafted after one of the widest-covering public consultations ever, adding that the VBSA Bill draft was circulated amongst 39 Union Ministries and Departments for consultations, The Hindu has learnt.