New Delhi — A high-level administrative-reform committee set up by the Indian government has recommended creating a special agency to oversee professional higher education, including engineering and medicine, and stripping the existing regulatory bodies of those powers, the newspaper Business Standard reported.

The panel’s recommendations are the latest in a series of attempts to reform India’s higher-education system, which many educators and government officials say is of mediocre quality and mired in bureaucracy.

In January, India’s National Knowledge Commission, another advisory panel, called for an independent regulatory authority and took aim at India’s multiplicity of regulators for higher education, often with overlapping mandates, which it said has created an overregulated, undergoverned system.

The new government committee echoed those views, but instead of a single, national-level regulatory authority, it called for an agency with separate councils on standards and quality for engineering, medicine, management, and other individual professional programs. The councils would be responsible for laying down parameters on the growth and development of their fields.

“They should take care of setting up new institutions, designing and updating curriculum, faculty improvement, carrying out research, and other key issues,” the report said. The committee also suggested full autonomy for the proposed councils, which it said should be accountable to parliament and have a body of experts to advise them.

Once the new councils are set up, it said, the work of the existing regulatory bodies should be confined to issues concerning registration, upgrading skills, and management of professional standards and ethics.

Most of India’s 16 existing regulatory agencies for higher education are against changes that would take away their powers. Critics say the existing agencies mistake regulation for governance. —Shailaja Neelakantan