The Supreme Court proposal for fresh probe into the cancelled deemed universities virtually fallen flat on Wednesday with their lawyer not agreeing to confining the inquiry to the 44 derecognised institutions but wanting to broaden its ambit to include all 136 deemed universities examined by HRD ministry’s Tandon committee.
Another point of their “resistance” to such a proposal was that if at all this exercise had to be done, then it should only be done by the University Grants Commission (UGC), a statutory body constituted under law to govern all types of universities in the country.
“If any fresh inquiry has to be done, it should include all the 136 deemed universities scrutinised by the Tandon committee,” a battery of top lawyers representing the 44 derecognised varsities told in one voice to a bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma, while rejecting the proposal.
The top laywers — Fali Nariman, K.K. Venugopal, Ashok Desai, Rajiv Dhawan, P.P. Rao — and several others insisted that the exercise of fresh probe has to be done only by a committee of the UGC.
But the matter was rather compounded with an “ambiguous” stand taken by the UGC counsel Rakesh Dwivedi, who on a persistent query by the bench could not give a straight reply on this crucial aspect.
The query was cryptic “can the government act on the UGC recommendations or can they act without it, or can the government ignore the UGC recommendations entirely?”
Initially, Mr Dwivedi said “We don’t invite any institution for grant of deemed university status. Whatever is advised, it is not binding on them (government). The government can take our advice but they are not bound by it,” he persisted.
But when the dissatisfied bench repeated its query in different forms to extract a clear-cut reply, Mr Dwivedi finally said “They (government) can collect material on the basis of their own information but they cannot act on it without any report form us (UGC).”
As the issue virtually became more “complex” in view of the derecognised universities’ lawyers not agreeing for the probe which will be confined only to the 44 institutions and UGS’ “flip-flop”, the apex court directed the HRD ministry to submit a detailed analysis about each of the 44 cancelled universities by September 21.
Amidst all this, solicitor general Gopal Subramanim, appearing for the Centre said that the ministry was not ready to yield on the Tandon committee findings so far as its report related to various shortcomings in the infrastructure were found by the panel.