New Delhi: The Bar Council of India (BCI) has opposed the government’s move to bring law education under the proposed Higher Education Commission of India (HECI), which will be a single regulator for higher studies.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) had last year announced its decision to replace the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) with the HECI. A bill in this regard is likely to be introduced in the winter session of Parliament this year.
The HECI will regulate most forms of technical education, including engineering, management, pharmacy and architecture, except for medical education which is likely to remain under the jurisdiction of the Medical Council of India (MCI), highly placed sources in the HRD ministry confirmed to ThePrint.
So far, higher education was regulated by the UGC and technical subjects such as engineering, management and pharmacy were managed by the AICTE. Legal education, meanwhile, was being monitored by the BCI. With HECI, it has been proposed that even legal studies will be overseen by the single regulator.
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‘Won’t tolerate outsider influence’
BCI has argued that the new proposed bill for HECI violates Advocates Act, 1961 which empowers the council to promote legal education and lay down its standards.
“No other commission or body could be more competent or efficient for legal education than the Legal Education Committee (LEC) of Bar Council of India. Moreover, we cannot tolerate the interference of any outsider in the matter of regulations of legal education,” read a statement by BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra.
The LEC lays down the norms and standards of law education in the country. It is headed by a former judge of the Supreme Court and its co-chairpersons are two sitting chief justices of high courts. Apart from that, the committee also has other members including vice-chancellors of law universities.
The HRD ministry, meanwhile, has said it wants to bring law education under HECI’s ambit in order to ‘clean up’ the system. “A lot of corruption goes on in various councils that have the task of regulating and granting accreditation to institutions, which is why we want to merge all the councils into one, including legal,” said a senior official, who did not wish to be named.
The government is likely to place the draft bill of HECI for Cabinet approval later this month. Once it is approved, the bill will pave way for authorities to create a single higher education regulator.
According to senior government officials, the bill proposes that HECI will only act as a body for regulating the quality of higher education and not deal with the funding part. Both the UGC and the AICTE had so far been involved in funding too.
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