The NDA government is preparing a third revision of rules and regulations of the nation’s 126 deemed-to-be universities. According to the a leading news daily, this round of reform may have existential repercussions because it aims to align deemed universities with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which has specifically recommended against various terminologies such as “deemed.”

This comes after the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, recently, asked the University Grants Commission (UGC) to ensure that the “deemed to be university” institution and method are properly linked with the NEP 2020.

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A high-powered committee has been formed to modify the 2019 deemed university laws, as per the news daily. This committee is said to have included former TCS chief executive officer S Ramadorai in addition to government officials and university vice-chancellors. As per sources, the committee will consider all aspects of ‘deemed-to-be-universities,’ but the primary idea will be to link them with the NEP 2020.

NEP 2020 advocates for higher education restructuring, recommending that the current “complex nomenclature of Higher Education Institutes in the country such as ‘deemed to be university,’ ‘affiliating university,’ ‘affiliating technical university,’ ‘unitary university’ be replaced simply by ‘university’ on meeting the norms.”

The jargon, however, itself is tangled in rulebooks. Changing it will almost certainly necessitate a couple of amendments including Section 23 of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956 that prohibits the use of the term “University” except by institutes established by acts of Parliament or a State Act.

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The Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956, on the other hand, allows an institute to be designated as a “deemed to be university” and to give degrees. This terminology has also been the topic of academic debates, legal proceedings, and multiple committee meetings. In fact, the concept of deemed varsities has been widely debated and highly politicized over past years.

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