India's Supreme Court Shuts Down 108 Private Universities in Ruling Against a State Law

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India's Supreme Court on Thursday quashed a provision of a state law that allowed the establishment of private universities in the State of Chhattisgarh, in central India. The court called the provision "unconstitutional" and said that the registrations of all 108 private universities in the state were canceled, rendering them null and void. Some 20,000 students are enrolled in the institutions.

Three years ago, the government then in power in Chhattisgarh passed the law, known as the Chhattisgarh Private Sector Universities (Establishment and Regulation) Act. It seemed like a smart move at the time, as Chhattisgarh has only two public universities to serve a population of 21 million. Instead, the law's loosely written regulations and lax oversight allowed dozens of storefront universities offering dubious courses of study to flourish. One listed a "shoe upper and maintenance" degree and a "garage and automotive" degree among its offerings (The Chronicle, June 18, 2004).

The state government made it legal for virtually anyone to set up shop as a university, placed no limits on the number of universities that could be opened, and failed to establish a monitoring body to determine and maintain educational standards. Among the institutions that have been shut down by the court order are Amity University, Anna Technical University, Mewar University, Rai University, and Shri Rawatapura Sarkar International University.

The court was acting on a petition filed by Professor Yashpal, an academic who uses only one name and who is a former chairman of India's main regulatory body for higher education, the University Grants Commission. In his petition, Mr. Yashpal questioned the legality of Chhattisgarh's bypassing the commission's role of examining proposed campuses and course offerings before granting university status to new institutions.

Since Chhattisgarh's private-universities law went into effect, he said, "the state government has been establishing universities simply by issuing notifications in the Gazette in an indiscriminate and mechanical manner." The Gazette is a bulletin published by the governement.

The court also directed the institutions whose registrations have been canceled to seek affiliations with the two government universities in Chhattisgarh -- Pandit Ravishankar Shukla University, in Raipur, and Guru Ghasidas University, in Bilaspur -- to protect students' interests.

"The Supreme Court has guarded the interests of the students," said Rajiv Tiwari, a spokesman for Rai University. "But the main worry for students is how long it takes for their institutions to gain affiliation to other universities."

In fact, Chhattisgarh, which in January 2004 elected a new government, amended the private-universities law to require all existing private universities to pay about $450,000 each by the end of June 2004 to create an endowment so that students would be reimbursed if the universities were sham operations.

Of the 108 universities that had set up shop -- some operating out of one-room homes or storefronts in shopping complexes -- only 37 fulfilled the fund requirements by the deadline. But the Supreme Court's decision on Thursday also includes those 37 institutions, which plan to appeal to the court. "The highest court of the land has passed this order," said Pradeep Kumar Maitra, a part-time journalism lecturer at Amity. "It is unlikely they will review it."

India desperately needs more universities to accommodate a growing number of college-bound students. The country's 300-odd public universities serve 9.3 million students, or about 7 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old population. The central government has said it wants to increase the college-going rate to 10 percent by 2007, a plan that would require it to find space for four million more students.

The Chhattisgarh experience, however, has made the atmosphere hostile for all private universities in India, in part because the government is enacting stricter regulations, but also because the public has become more skeptical about private institutions.

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