UGC’s 2025 Draft Guidelines: The Corporate-Hindutva Takeover of Higher Education?
Shirin Akhter, Sachin N. | 12 March 2025 | Countercurrents.org
The University Grants Commission’s (UGC) Draft Guidelines and Draft Regulations on Minimum Qualifications, Recruitment, and Promotions (2025) are hurriedly being pushed as necessary compliance with short deadlines and smaller discussion windows. Any policy push, when rushed, gives a feeling of imposition and hidden implications. It is hence important to critically examine the impact of these guidelines on public-funded education, academic autonomy, faculty welfare, and their overall ideological imperative.
The New Education Policy 2020 has adopted Four Year Under Graduation (FYUG) and the first batch of these students will graduate only in 2026. Drafting higher education and research regulations without monitoring the implementation aspects and learning outcomes of the students under NEP FYUG looks academically unsound. This has already raised the concerns of the two crucial stakeholders, viz., teachers and students. Teachers are also agitated by the fact that these drafts have not been accompanied by the due UGC pay revision process as in the past….