With the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adishthan Bill getting the cabinet nod in December, higher education in India is set to see a massive hierarchy change.

The Bill paves the way for a new higher education commission that will now police universities, engineering colleges, and teacher-training institutions, and set standards for them. Essentially, this single body is replacing the University Grants Commission (UGC), the premier regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which deals with engineering institutions, and the National Council for Teacher Education, which sets standards for teacher training.

Medicine and law are outside the new overarching body’s ambit, and so, they retain their own regulatory bodies.

The pitch is simple: bring all institutions under one regulator, make bureaucracy easier. But the Bill is not just about that.

Crucially, this new commission will not have the means to grant funds to any university. For the first time in 70-odd years, the regulator has been separated from the funding body.

So far, the UGC funded universities in India for their research and training purposes based on the annual budget it received from the central education ministry. That’s no longer the case now. With the new Bill, the new regulator can stick to regulation, and the ministry can disburse funds directly. Funding “simplified” is the claim.

But nothing’s ever that straightforward when it comes to government funding.

Academics worry that instead of simplifying, funding will not only be centralised but also lopsided. And that reputed state universities that sprawl across India, in particular, might get the short end of the stick.

The National Education Policy (NEP) of 2020 envisioned four verticals for a higher-education commission to work with. One for regulation, or to set the rules. One to set standards, such as what a student should learn by the end of their degree. One for accreditation, to rate universities based on their performance. And finally, a grants vertical, to finance public institutions.

The current Bill talks about all but financing.

One of the things the NEP talks about is to link funds to Institutional Development Plans (IDPs)—basically, strategic plans where universities develop initiatives, assess their own progress, and reach the goals set therein. And academics expect the education ministry to follow through on this.