Lawfully Yours: By Retired Justice K Chandru | UGC can make regulations relating to standards in higher education sector

UGC can make regulations relating to standards in higher education sector

Will the recent UGC draft regulation that gives more powers to the Governors to form search panels to appoint Vice-Chancellors for universities stand the scrutiny of law? The state governments that fund the functioning of the universities under their control will effectively be out of the picture in V-C appointments if this new regulation is accepted. Even though V-C's selection is mired in controversies and corruption, removing the state government from selecting the heads of varsities seems illogical. If it leads to litigation, will the courts uphold the change?

— N Ramasamy, Medavakkam, Chennai

Education comes under the concurrent list and both the Centre and state governments can legislate. The UGC and central government can make regulations under Entry 66 of the Union List, relating to 'coordination and standards' in higher education or research/technical institutions.

However, in the guise of making regulations, they cannot bestow the power of appointments to the Chancellor. At present, most state universities have the Governor as the ex-officio Chancellor. Going by the antics of RN Ravi (TN) and Arif Khan (previous Governor in Kerala), the legislatures have amended the law to make the chief ministers as Chancellors.

The Centre is sitting over those amendments without advising the President to give assent to those laws. Without doing it, they further want to erode states' powers.

Filing a case will not help. Only political action by all the states to make education a state subject will help.

To get court to order police protection, litigant's side should also be clean

I am building a house beside a 3-foot lane, with access to an 18-foot road. Once I started bringing construction materials, the vicious chain of collecting bribes by all and sundry began. First, the local councillor collected bribes for unloading construction materials on the roadside briefly. Then, after I took up the roofing works by night, informing my neighbours, I had to pay local police on patrol as the vehicle supplying ready-mix concrete was considered an impediment to 'traffic' in the middle of the night. Is there any way out?

— R Madhavan, Chennai

Building a concrete house in a 3-ft lane (maybe having only huts) itself may be unjust. For any activity in a rural area, you got to pay the mini gods and the uniformed force. But don't you think operating a concrete mixture unit at odd hours in a populated area is a nuisance?

If you do such things then you got to pay for it. If you think that by getting a court order you can get police protection to carry on with work, the court will also put many conditions on timing, reduction of noise, removal of dumping materials on road etc. Further, you can't antagonise the locals because you will have to live there afterwards. So better settle the matter locally.