Why India’s universities need a good ordinance and a good heart

Anyone raised on folktales would know the tale of Tenali Rama and the cat. Vijayanagara is overrun by rats, and King Krishnadevaraya decrees the tidiest of solutions: a cat in every household to hunt them, and a cow too to provide milk for the cat.

The order is obeyed to the letter, and it fails completely. Fattened on free milk, the cats grow plump and drowsy and lose all interest in rats. The rule was followed perfectly; its purpose quietly defeated. It takes Tenali’s mischief — a bowl of scalding milk — to send one cat back to hunting and remind the court that the point was never the milk.

It was the rats. I have been thinking about that contented cat while reading two very different documents this month. One is a gazette notification titled the University Grants Commission’s (Minimum Standards of Instruction for the Grant of UG and PG Degrees) Regulations, 2025.

The other is a quiet essay on why some teachers treat the classroom as a calling, not a job. One tells universities what they must do. The other reminds educators why the work matters. The perennial danger in Indian higher education is the king’s: we design an orderly rule, congratulate ourselves when it is obeyed, and never check whether the rats are gone.

Together, these documents are an antidote: one supplies the rule, and the other offers its reason. The 2025 regulations do something subtle. On assessment, they mandate that “there shall be continuous evaluation in each course in addition to semester/year-end examinations”, making continuous internal evaluation (CIE) non-negotiable.

But the UGC refuses to dictate the recipe. It does not fix a magic 30:70 split, nor tell a Physics department how to weigh a viva against a field report. It hands that decision to “the appropriate academic body of the university” and insists only that students be told the scheme at the start of the semester, not cruelly in the week preceding examinations.

Then come two guarantees that students will recognise as fair. The marking stays confidential, but the system must be “sufficiently transparent”. A student “shall be given access to his/her answer script”. The heart of it: institutions “shall accord priority to continuous formative assessment”.

The message is clear: Delhi sets the guardrails; the driving is left to you. This is autonomy with teeth. The UGC may debar a defaulting institution or strike it off the recognised list. But autonomy, as every Board of Studies knows, is a double-edged gift.

Give a committee freedom to design its own CIE and you might get imaginative, outcome-linked assessment or four hurriedly scribbled “assignment marks” from a teacher who would rather be elsewhere. The regulation can compel the structure of fairness.

It cannot legislate the spirit of it. That is precisely where the second document walks in. The essay on teaching-as-vocation sounds sentimental until you notice how practical it is. A profession can be “chosen, practised competently, and set aside at day’s end”.

A vocation stays with you, shaping how deeply you invest in the people before you. The teacher who treats the work as a calling does not need a circular to give honest feedback; she gives it because a half-read script betrays a student who trusted her with a semester.

Recall Eklavya, the forest boy who mastered archery before a clay statue of the teacher who refused to teach him. The tale is usually told as a tragedy, ending in the demand for his thumb as guru-dakshina. But flip it around and it is the sharpest possible lesson in what assessment is for.

His skill was real; the system judging him was not. A brilliant learner failed not because of his ability but by the governance of his evaluation. The right to see your own answer script is the republic’s promise that no Eklavya is again judged in the dark.

A regulation can hand out the cats and the cows. Only someone who remembers the rats can make the hunting happen. Consider the scale. India now enrols a record 4.5 crore students at a Gross Enrolment Ratio of 30; the National Education Policy wants 50% by 2035, across some 1,278 universities and 46,000 colleges.

Yet the latest All India Survey on Higher Education reports that nearly half of India’s universities have not yet adopted the very qualifications framework this reform rests on. Just 51% have taken up the National Higher Education Qualifications Framework.

The reform is half-done. Who finishes it, and do they count cats or chase rats? For faculty, the pairing is liberating rather than burdensome. When you design a richer, outcome-linked assessment, you are not freelancing.

The regulation has your back; continuous, imaginative evaluation is now exactly what the law asks of you. Policy without meaning breeds box-ticking. Meaning without policy breeds burnout. Together they produce something rare: sustainable good teaching.

For students, the most useful sentence in the 2025 Regulations is this: you are entitled to see your own evaluated answer script and to know your assessment scheme before the semester begins (not after!). Ask for both. That is the floor the rulebook guarantees; the vocational teacher sets the ceiling with feedback that supports meaningful improvement.

Rights on paper mean nothing if the marker couldn’t care less. Both must be present, or the rats stay put. For university leadership, including VCs, Deans, HoDs, and IQAC coordinators, this involves building an ecosystem at once policy-compliant, ethically robust and student-centred.

Compliance can be audited; ethics have to be cultivated through hiring, mentoring, and the unglamorous work of protecting a teacher’s time so that reading scripts carefully is possible, not heroic. An IQAC dashboard that tracks whether marks were uploaded on time but never whether they were fair is measuring the milk, not the rats.

The committees most people never see, such as the Boards of Studies and the examination panels, are now the real custodians of fairness. It is they who set the...