3 months ago
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Last month, the University Grants Commission (UGC) (Promotion of Equity successful Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, triggered protests by a conception of wide class students. On January 29, 2026, the Supreme Court stayed the implementation of the regulations.
These regulations are necessitated by an undeniable reality. Caste-, gender-, and religion-based favoritism successful higher acquisition is persistent and has been expanding successful caller times. Grievance redressal mechanisms person been notoriously slow, often discretionary, and astatine times lone symbolic, leaving students from marginalised communities to endure the consequences successful silence. Even the astir ardent opponents of these caller regulations cannot, therefore, contradict the necessity of specified an intervention. Why past are determination protests?
A troubling combination
The absorption to the regulations stems from an apprehension that immoderate members of historically disadvantaged and marginalised sections whitethorn exploit the structural flaws successful the regulations — specified arsenic the vagueness of the explanation of discrimination, the creation of the equity committee, and the process to beryllium followed to get grievances redressed — to victimise precocious castes. This reflects distrust and fearfulness that measures aimed astatine providing justness to 1 conception could go unjust for others.
Introduced to tackle caste-based favoritism with unprecedented urgency, the regulations importune connected swift redressal. They accidental complaints indispensable beryllium acknowledged immediately, committees convened fast, and inquiries concluded wrong rigid timelines. This plan rests connected the presumption that velocity and fairness reenforce 1 another. Yet justness systems crossed the satellite suggest otherwise.
Quick timelines and cardinal monitoring without wide procedural standards make fear. Institutions interest astir regulatory penalties they cannot contest. Faculty and students interest astir reputational harm from complaints processed rapidly and unfairly. The operation of velocity and procedural vagueness is bound to pb to protests.
Thin process
The caller regulations presume that the clip taken successful exercising owed diligence and completing procedural formalities successful grievance redressal is tantamount to organization inertia. They question to guarantee accelerated enforcement by threatening higher acquisition institutions with dire consequences. The connection is clear. Neutrality is nary longer an option. Whether that displacement commands legitimacy, however, volition beryllium not connected intent alone, but connected the architecture of enforcement.
The acquisition of American universities during the 2010s is instructive. Faced with unit to enactment swiftly connected field misconduct, institutions prioritised speed, lone to brushwood sustained judicial pushback implicit vague evidentiary standards, unclear rights of response, and reputational harm inflicted earlier findings were established. The backlash arose due to the fact that the process was thin.
Clearly, justness that moves rapidly but unclearly destroys trust. That hazard is magnified by however the UGC regulations administer authority. They bash not specify offences oregon penalties. Investigation is delegated to interior equity committees, and punishment is imposed done existing organization work oregon disciplinary rules. The UGC itself does not adjudicate idiosyncratic guilt; it penalises institutions for non-compliance. This creates a almighty inducement structure. Faced with the menace of de-recognition oregon backing withdrawal, universities are encouraged to prioritise disposable enactment implicit cautious adjudication. In this system, ambiguity creates fear, which seldom fosters justice.
In a complaint-driven enforcement model, the consequences could beryllium adjacent much harmful. The quality to papers harm, explicit it successful organization language, and navigate committees is unevenly distributed: portion agrarian students and linguistic minorities often conflict to construe regular favoritism into administratively legible complaints, those with greater taste and organization vulnerability are amended positioned to mobilise the system. As a result, a authorities designed to amplify marginal voices ends up privileging the institutionally fluent among them.
Compliance theatre
These pressures inevitably spill into classrooms and supervisory relationships. Universities run done changeless grading, feedback, and assessment, each of which are inherently subjective. When world judgement is subjected to regulatory scrutiny without procedural clarity, hazard aversion becomes the astir logical course. Faculty respond by diluting feedback, avoiding hard conversations, and sanitising evaluation.
Over time, institutions larn ways to bypass the complexities. Committees multiply, documentation thickens, and compliance becomes performative. Governance scholars picture this arsenic compliance theatre, a improvement wherever organisations larn to show betterment without addressing underlying hierarchies. India’s higher acquisition strategy is uneven crossed regions and institutions and is susceptible to this drift.
Justice successful universities indispensable not beryllium a contention to the archetypal response. It should beryllium a long, hard conversation. One that demands urgency, yes, but besides precision, patience, and the humility to revise.
Sameer Ahmad Khan, probe student astatine Jamia Millia Islamia; Furqan Qamar, erstwhile prof of absorption astatine Jamia Millia Islamia
