Quality and work ethic have been a long-term problem in India`s higher education. The strange situation in India, in comparison with foreign universities in the US and Europe, has been that of having a few institutions of global quality and rest have remained as backwaters of the educational system. The best of our institutions and scholarship
is comparable to global standards and our worst is as worst as any other lesser developed nations. The problem is the middle-level institutions, while in the US and Europe they maintain a bare threshold level, our institutions fare rather poorly. The primary reason for having a poor average has been both poor infrastructure and even poorer work ethic. When analysts of social policy want a robust state intervention, they hardly reflect on how to bring about a better and more accountable work ethic. Even in top rated universities such as JNU, only about 25 per cent of the faculty is productive and globally competent.

Further, over the last few decades, there has been an erosion of the quality in state universities and institutions in comparison with the Central universities. In the 1970s the best of scholars who returned with degrees from foreign universities returned back to their home states and contributed to their growth. Universities such as Allahabad and BHU in the north, and Osmania and Madras universities in the south were recognised as top-rated universities. However, over the last few decades these institutions have witnessed a terminal decline. They declined primarily because of poor funding from state governments, owing to which the best of the faculty migrated to central universities, essentially located in Delhi. Universities such as the IITs, JNU and DU, while undoubtedly contributed a great deal in pursuing globally recognisable research, they nevertheless have singularly undermined the state universities by poaching on the best available scholarship in these institutions. Better academic atmosphere, more autonomy, and differential payments made central universities more attractive, while the institutions of state government became dens of `ignorance and isolationism`. They collapsed into sites of inbreeding, networking and kinship based recruitment. Added to that or owing to that was poor work ethic and infrastructural facilities. In much of North India higher education simply caved in with dysfunctional universities and an education of abysmal standards.

After India became a signatory to the WTO agreement on educational institutions, overnight there was a realisation of the need to stand up to global standards. And global ranking has made this even starker. The urge to figure in the top 200 universities of the world has prompted changes in the way higher education was being regulated by the University Grants Commission, and later by the NAAC. As part of the ongoing changes, the UGC has come up with its latest order- UGC (Categorization of Universities for Grant of Graded Autonomy) Regulations, 201 7. Under this order it is stated-

The Commission may have different provisions for different categories of Institutions as defined in Clause 3.1 with the objective of giving higher levels of autonomy to Institutions under Category I compared to institutions under Categories II or III, and to institutions under Category II compared to institutions under Category III. 4.2 While framing any Regulation, the Commission may also sub-categorize any of the Categories in that Regulation to give a differentiated autonomy under that specific Regulation to institutions within that category

This is a far reaching regulatory order that is probably recognising that there is a massive gap between the quality of education provided by the various universities, essentially the gap is between state and central universities. However, in recognising the gap, the University Grants Commission is promulgating graded autonomy, which in effect will also mean graded funding to the differentially located universities would only end up exacerbating those differences. The primary reason being neither is there a concerted effort to understand the reasons behind differential performance and outcome nor is there a concern to protect, nurture and improve the poorly performing universities. Instead in line with the rest of the policy frame, only public institutions of standing will be retained for state funding and the rest would be eased out gradually, yielding space for private universities. Private universities, going by their track records perhaps have had a far worst-off track record compared to even the poorly performing state universities. Quality has never been the mainstay of private universities, instead what they brought in was a market-job oriented courses that offered some kind of opportunities. In essence, what the current government intends to do is to phase out public funded universities the way state owned industries, Airways, Railways, telecom, and postal services have gradually been shrinking.

Research cannot be improved merely by regulating universities, instead they need efforts to create enabling atmosphere for which it is imperative to grant more autonomy, better funding and new instruments to regulate work ethic. Work ethic has been a long-standing problem. In order to improve the work ethic and output it is imperative address the impending problems that include linguistic skills, bringing local knowledge systems into formal structures, and improving the diversity through more representative schemes. If the developments in JNU are a case in point, where there has been a massive seat-cut in the name of teacher-student ratio and maintaining quality, it is only apparent that quality is only a trope to pursue marketisation and commercialisation of education system in India. These policies will disempower a majority pushing them into technical and vocational education and reserving higher education to a privileged few, whether the open democratic system India will succeed in resisting this is a question that one has to wait and watch.