HECI Bill 2025: Last Twist of Knife on Public Education

Now that the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill, 2025, the renamed Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) Bill, has been formally shared with Members of Parliament, it is both necessary and urgent to read the Bill carefully. What emerges from a section-by-section reading is deeply troubling. This is not a routine regulatory reform. It is a fundamental restructuring of higher education that raises serious concerns about executive overreach, erosion of academic freedom, weakening of federalism, and the systematic exclusion of vulnerable social groups.

At its core, the Bill is not about efficiency or quality. It is about intent.

The HECI Bill resurrects, in spirit, the proposal that was forced off the table in 2018 after unprecedented public resistance. More than one lakh teachers, students, researchers and citizens had then rejected it. That opposition was not reactionary or nostalgic; it was democratic. The response of the present government is telling: erase that memory of resistance, rename the Bill, secure Cabinet approval, and move swiftly before collective opposition can gather again.

The Bill must, therefore, be understood as part of a larger ideological project, one that seeks to centralise power, hollow out federalism, and bring public institutions under tighter political control. By repealing the UGC Act and subsuming multiple regulatory bodies into a single Centrally-controlled authority, the Bill concentrates unprecedented power in the hands of the Union government. This concentration is not accidental. It reflects a deeper hostility toward autonomous institutions, especially universities, which have historically been spaces of debate, dissent and democratic imagination.

The message is unmistakable: universities are no longer to be places where ideas are freely contested. They are to be disciplined, audited and governed from above.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the Bill is the removal of financial powers from the UGC (University Grants Commission) and the transfer of grant allocation to the Ministry of Education or a government-controlled Special Purpose Vehicle. This delinking of funding from regulation effectively weaponises public finance.

In a deeply unequal society, funding decisions are never neutral. Institutions that serve Dalit, Adivasi, OBC (Other Backward Classes), minority and working-class students depend overwhelmingly on public funding. When grants are delayed, made conditional, or withdrawn, the consequences are immediate and visible, fewer scholarships, crumbling hostels, understaffed departments, and rising fees.

For students from privileged backgrounds, higher fees may be inconvenient but for students coming from under-privileged backgrounds, first-generation learners, especially women, these are often decisive. Many simply drop out. What is presented as reform thus deepens existing class, caste and gender hierarchies.

The Bill also empowers the regulator to audit, downgrade or shut down institutions deemed “underperforming.” But underperformance is rarely an abstract failure. It is the predictable result of decades of underfunding and neglect. Rural colleges, women’s colleges, minority institutions and state universities in poorer regions are precisely the institutions that educate the bulk of India’s youth. These are now being set up to fail. Closures or forced mergers will not be replaced by better public alternatives. Entire regions and communities risk losing their only access to higher education.

This is not efficiency. It is educational dispossession.

The centralisation built into the Bill further undermines the federal character of education. State governments, which run and fund the majority of universities and colleges, are reduced to marginal roles, even as decision-making is consolidated in Delhi. States with limited fiscal capacity will be unable to compensate for shrinking Central support. Regional inequalities will deepen. A small number of well-funded metropolitan institutions may flourish, while state-funded colleges quietly wither. The language of “uniform standards” becomes a convenient cover for enforcing unequal outcomes on an uneven field.

Read Also: Squeezing Higher Education Through the Neoliberal Wringer: Academic Autonomy and the HECI

The human cost of this restructuring will also be borne by teachers. Audit-driven governance, performance metrics and regulatory threats will make job security even more elusive. The Bill will intensify the already rampant contractualisation of academic labour. Young scholars, women teachers burdened with unpaid care work, and academics from marginalised backgrounds are already disproportionately trapped in insecure positions. Under this regime, the problem will only worsen. Academic freedom becomes a privilege of the few. For the many, silence becomes a survival strategy. Universities cannot produce critical knowledge when fear governs employment.

Institutional autonomy is further hollowed out by the requirement that every regulation framed by the Commission must receive prior approval of the Central government. This opens the door to ideological policing. Universities that encourage research and teaching on caste oppression, gender injustice, communal violence, state repression or economic inequality will find themselves particularly vulnerable. Students from marginalised communities, who have long relied on universities as spaces of intellectual and political empowerment stand to lose the most.

A closer reading of the Bill also raises serious constitutional concerns. Section 45 subordinates the Commission and its Councils to binding “policy directions” of the Central government, while Section 47 empowers the Centre to supersede these bodies altogether and directly assume regulatory control. This concentration of unchecked executive discretion sits uneasily with Article 14’s protection against arbitrariness.

Section 33 authorises heavy financial penalties, withdrawal of grants, revocation of degree-granting powers and even closure of institutions, creating a chilling effect on academic freedom that undermines Article 19(1)(a) in substance, if not in form. Section 49 gives the Act overriding effect over all existing higher-education laws, eroding the federal balance in a domain constitutionally located in the Concurrent List. Uniform regulatory norms imposed on structurally unequal institutions risk indirect discrimination, offending Articles 14 and 15, while the foreseeable contraction of access through closures and fee hikes raises concerns under Article 21’s guarantee of life with dignity, including the right to education and livelihood.

The HECI Bill does not arrive in isolation. It follows the National Education Policy 2020, which has already destabilised higher education through chaotic admissions, unfilled seats under CUET (Central University Entrance Test), rising costs, diluted curricula, shrinking fellowships and institutional mergers. Women students, rural youth, Dalit and Adivasi scholars, and research students dependent on public funding have been hit hardest. The HECI Bill compounds this damage by installing an authoritarian regulator at a moment of systemic fragility.

Why This Bill Must Be Fought

The Cabinet approval of the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill confirms what the manner of its introduction had already made clear: the government is determined to proceed without consent. But consent is not a procedural inconvenience. It is the ethical foundation of democracy. A higher-education system rebuilt through secrecy, exclusion and executive fiat is not reform; it is authoritarian restructuring.

This Bill marks a decisive break from the idea of public education as a social right, won through decades of struggle. It redefines education as a managed, marketised and politically supervised sector. Such transformations are never neutral. Their costs will be borne by working-class students for whom education is a fragile ladder out of poverty; by rural youth whose colleges already struggle to survive; by women students whose access is most sensitive to rising costs; by Dalit, Adivasi and minority communities for whom public universities are rare spaces of mobility and voice; by precariously employed teachers whose livelihoods depend on compliance; and by state institutions without political clout.

To oppose the HECI Bill, therefore, is an act of resistance to the conversion of universities into administrative outposts of the State, resistance to the neoliberal shrinking of public education, and resistance to the authoritarian capture of knowledge itself.

Universities are not factories for producing credentials, nor are they extensions of government departments. These are among the last remaining democratic spaces where ideas can be questioned, hierarchies challenged and alternative futures imagined. When such spaces are brought under centralised bureaucratic control, society loses not only academic freedom, but its capacity for dissent and self-reflection.

If this Bill passes, India will not merely lose a regulator. It will lose a vital public institution that has nurtured critical thought, social movements, scientific inquiry and democratic imagination. The damage will not be immediately visible in rankings or balance sheets. It will unfold slowly, in closed colleges, silenced classrooms and excluded students.

That is why the HECI Bill must be withdrawn. Not postponed. Not cosmetically amended. Withdrawn. Because the future of public higher education, and with it the future of democratic life itself, is too important to be surrendered in silence.

Shirin Akhter is Associate Professor at Zakir Husain Delhi College, University of Delhi. The views are personal.