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Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh, who heads the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth, and Sports wrote to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan Friday, urging that the Higher Education Commission of India Bill 2025, which seeks to merge the functions of three statutory bodies, be referred to the Standing Committee.
Singh wrote: “Given that this is a significant legislation which majorly rewrites the existing Education Governance Architecture of this country, I believe it is critical that it be examined and discussed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee before it is taken up by the Parliament as a whole.”
According to the Lok Sabha bulletin issued last week, the Bill is set to be introduced during the Winter Session. In line with the NEP 2020, the Bill aims to set up a single regulatory authority for higher education, merging the UGC, the AICTE, and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE).
Singh said the Bill be referred to the committee with a “deadline of the end of the first phase of the Budget session”.
In a report presented to Parliament in February this year, the committee observed, “State Universities, which educate over 90% of the student population, are caught in between national and state-level regulations. The draft Higher Education Commission of India Bill appears to perpetuate many of these same issues by maintaining a Central Government-heavy composition and insufficient state representation.”
