Arjun Singh

NEW DELHI: Unaided deemed to be universities on Thursday agreed to implement the new reservation regime but wanted concrete assurances from the Government on fee structuring. In particular, they wanted a foreign students' quota with higher fees to be able to cross-subsidise the education of students from the weaker sections.

The broad consensus on reservation, fees and merit-based admissions was arrived at, at a meeting convened here by Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh with a representative group of heads of the universities. Though there are 64 unaided deemed to be universities, Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors of only eight were invited.

The meeting discussed a draft Bill prepared to extend reservation to unaided deemed to be universities. While all accepted the policy, the representatives had suggestions on rationalising the fee structure and evolving a mechanism for merit-based education.

Mr. Singh said the views of the universities would be conveyed to a core group of Ministers, who would take a final view on the Bill. However, both the Ministry officials and the representatives were tight-lipped on the suggestions made at the meeting vis-à-vis fee structure and merit-based education.

The universities invited to the meeting were: Symbiosis (Pune), Bharati Vidyapeeth (Pune), Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Vellore Institute of Technology, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham (Coimbatore), Birla Institute of Technology and Science (Pilani), LNM Institute of Information Technology (Jaipur), Jaypee Institute of Information Technology (Noida). The group included the oldest and youngest unaided deemed to be universities — Manipal and LNM.

Earlier, in May, the Ministry had secured the endorsement of all deemed to be universities — aided and unaided — for Article 15(5) that had been introduced in the Constitution through the 93rd Amendment to ensure reservation of seats for the Scheduled Castes, the Scheduled Tribes and socially and educationally backward classes in educational institutions.

Thursday's interaction — which comes close on the heels of last week's meeting convened by the core group with State Education Ministers on the proposed Bill — is being billed as the last of the series of consultations on the draft legislation which had been finalised along with `The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Bill, 2006' introduced in Parliament in the Monsoon Session but put on hold for wider consideration.

Though the HRD Ministry had wanted to include unaided deemed to be universities in the Bill for OBC reservation in Central educational institutions, a Group of Ministers (GoM) vetoed it and called for a separate legislation.

The GoM was of the view that an umbrella legislation might not stand legal scrutiny.

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