HRD Ministry

Even though the recently introduced Foreign Education Providers’ Bill allows renowned foreign universities to set up their campuses in the country, the government indicated that it would not permit public and private foreign universities that operate only for profit to open their institutes in India. This condition has already been set in the Foreign Education Bill along with the other two clauses that includes restricting foreign universities to take funds back to their country and maintaining minimum corpus of US $11 million.

Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal will discuss recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report with vice chancellors of all central universities in Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh. Formation of the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) is also expected to figure prominently during the meeting.

Setting at rest all the speculations over the fate of World Bank-funded Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) in the wake of Right to Education Act coming into force, the HRD Ministry has made it clear that the decade-old scheme will be merged with the right to education. Like the RET Act, the Central scheme too seeks to universalize education in the country. 

Now that the Right to Education Act is in place, it is the responsibility of the government to see that the law is implemented in letter and spirit in right earnest. While enactment of the law could have been an easy task, its implementation is not. The real test of universalisation education lies in mobilizing enough resources to see the ambitious project through. 

As the government has decided to dispense with the Central regulatory bodies like University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), employees of these agencies are bound to be worried about their future. Once a super regulator is constituted to replace these agencies, their staff will be rendered jobless. 

With the lurking uncertainty over the future of University Grant Commission (UGC), its plenary meeting ended up in a face-off between the top rung officials and the employees when the latter threatened to go on strike from Tuesday. 

The salary revision has become a major bone of contention between the IIMs and the HRD Ministry, with neither of the parties ready to back up on the issue. While the meetings between the two have proved a futile exercise, the IIMs are taking up innovative measures to fight this battle which is expected to drag on for long. Similar future actions were discussed in the meeting of the board of IIM Ahmedabad. 

In a departure from its earlier promise of an IIM to Jammu and Kashmir, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal has announced setting up of another Central university in the state. The university is being planned in deference to the special status enjoyed by the border state. 

While extending out dialogue offer to the IIT professor disillusioned with the government over the pay issue, Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal made it clear that he won’t budge from his oft repeated stand on the issue. He called that their demand for pay scales on par with the world universities untenable. 

Even though the Central Board of Secondary Education has given out details of its Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) Procedure, many schools in Bangalore are still clueless about the new system as they have yet to receive written orders from CBSE to follow the same from October onwards.