The VBSA Bill and the Intense Capitalist Seizure of Indian Education System

In late 2025, the Union Cabinet approved the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill (VBSA Bill) which proposes to radically change India’s higher education regulatory framework. The VBSA Bill proposes to “retire” the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE) and put all of them under one, potentially, an almighty regulator. The government claims that this bill is an attempt to ‘improve governance and the quality of academics.’ However, this is indicative of a fundamental change in the role of higher education, one that is driven by neoliberal imperatives of capital and state control, rather than democratic accountability and social necessity.

The gradual neoliberal restructuring of India’s higher education system, which began in the congress regime, is even intensified. Public funding has not kept pace with mass enrolment, private universities have multiplied replacing private institutions. The UGC has increasingly had to regulate a system of universities that has been shaped by market logic. The VBSA Bill is an example of consolidating regulatory capability under an agency that is fully aligned with the central state and with the priorities of capital.

Back in 2026, the University Grants Commission rolled out fresh directives aimed at tackling caste-based bias in colleges; schools had to set up official channels for handling student grievances and put checks in place for safeguarding Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC learners following growing accounts of mistreatment across university grounds. But lately, India's top court paused those rules, arguing the wording lacked precision - especially Section 3(c), which limits who can file caste-related claims only to SC/ST/OBC individuals, possibly shutting out others while offering little protection against false accusations. Although judges said they were protecting fairness and clear law, their move stalls actions students have pushed hard for years to confront deep-rooted caste harm inside academic spaces. Seen closely, it shows how courts - filled mostly with officials from powerful social backgrounds - tend to see inequality through strict legal angles instead of daily struggles faced by excluded people. Rather than fixing unclear parts and moving forward, halting everything freezes change, keeps weak old methods running, and holds back progress in breaking down caste walls in universities.

From a Marxist view, small changes meant to shield marginalised communities often get pulled into wider battles over class and caste dominance. When policies appear that target deep-rooted bias, dominant social circles tend to push back fast. They raise concerns about balance, correct process, or impartiality - not always because those are broken, but because change unsettles their position. Courts stepping in shows how official structures may protect old orders instead of challenging them. These spaces usually house people tied to administrative elites, making shifts harder when privilege is under pressure. Letting student voices grow louder inside colleges might shift things differently - tying together learners and staff, building oversight teams rooted in real experience, drawing firm lines against abuse as well as exclusion. Change sticks better when paired with larger fixes: steady public money for learning institutions, teaching methods aware of lived hierarchy. Real progress means hitting the roots of unfairness where it lives, not just marking improvements on paper.The VBSA Bill has been justified with the aim of simplification and streamlining of processes, but the design of the new regulatory body shows otherwise. It is an attempt to centralize regulatory power further with the government and diminish the role of the academia. The proposed structure suggests that the overwhelming majority of these decision-makers will be bureaucrats and government appointees-with independent scholars being a mere afterthought. The Standing Committee of Parliament has indicated this as “excessive centralization,” which completely ignored this criticism. This centralization represents a significant shift in who can set the agenda on what is to be prioritized in the education sector. Instead of the educational institutions and the faculty being in control of the design of the curricula and the academic standards, a central body - which is always guided by bourgeois policy - will have increasing control over higher education. This is not reform; it is a deliberate alignment of the education sector with the requirements of the state and capital. The concentration of power in the hands of state is what the VBSA Bill has been criticized for most, and that is evident in the lack of federal balance in the governance of higher education.

Academics and state officials are worried that state universities may lose their autonomy and focus more on rules and regulations made in the center. With no collaborative federal governance mechanism providing something like a federal council comparable to the GST Council, states may have to bear more financial burdens while having insufficient policy and programming control. The separation of regulation and funding, where funding will continue to be the responsibility of the MoE, signals a more profound restructuring. While the UGC has historically shielded a portion of public university funding from grants, the new regime separates funding from regulation. This change further enhances the tendency to marketize education or compromise with the quality of education.

Intellectual Work under Capital: Precarity and Discipline

The reorganisation of universities under the VBSA Bill must be understood as part of a broader process in which intellectual work is subsumed under capitalist relations of production. Teachers and the intellectuals are reduced to the pattern of typical wage-earners(not proletariat) whose intellectual activity is increasingly subordinated to state and market imperatives. The spread of ad-hoc appointments, fixed-term contracts, performance-linked renewals, and arbitrary evaluations reflects the general tendency of capital to render all labour flexible, insecure, and politically manageable.

As Karl Marx makes clear, capitalism does not merely exploit labour, it reorganises it to ensure obedience. Intellectual work within universities is now reorganised so that security is replaced by contingency, and autonomy by compliance. The VBSA Bill does not introduce this transformation; it codifies and deepens it, embedding precarity into the very architecture of regulation. The UGC draft regulations of 2025 already reveal how evaluation criteria such as “notable contributions” and “institutional performance” operate as ideological instruments. These vague formulations allow authorities to reward intellectual conformity and penalise critical or oppositional work. Under the VBSA framework, such mechanisms are centralised and standardised, ensuring that intellectual workers are evaluated not on the basis of social or scholarly value, but on their alignment with administratively defined objectives.

This is consistent with what Lenin described the bourgeois state’s need for specialists who “serve capital faithfully.” Intellectuals are tolerated only insofar as their activity does not disrupt the ideological and economic order. Precarity becomes the means through which discipline is enforced: when employment is uncertain and advancement opaque, dissent carries immediate material risk.

The VBSA Bill thus transforms universities into spaces where intellectual work is continuously audited, measured, and corrected. Teaching and research are no longer social practices oriented toward critical inquiry or collective emancipation, but administrative functions judged by compliance metrics.

Students As Commodities

The most evident consequences of the bill are on students. As funding models become decoupled from the regulatory system, public universities may be compelled to adopt more market-oriented practices: increased fees, greater dependency on student payments, and financially accessible education through loans. This not only violates the constitutionally guaranteed equal access to education, it also commodifies students - reducing them to holders of future labor potential who must “pay” for the privilege to participate. The negative effects are not only financial. Education risks becoming simply a mechanism for the labor market rather than a space for critical thinking, intellectual engagement, and social mobility.

Centralization not only undermines state autonomy, it also eliminates the spaces for democratic deliberation that exist in universities. An expanded parliamentary review and stakeholder engagement have been requested by students and faculty in opposition to the bill. Critics say the Bill repeats the mistakes of the former HECI proposal that was shelved in 2018 for centralising power and allowing political interference. Such protests illustrate a more serious political issue. The regulatory regime shows that the protests are more serious than political concerns and crises in the educational system and that the administrative values being applied to universities ignore their role as instruments of democracy

The Use Of Metrics, Surveillance, And Control

The new regulatory culture, in addition to structural reforms, applies Metrics and Regulatory Compliance, Surveillance, and Control. The emphasis is placed on bureaucratic compliance rather than educational enhancement due to gradated penalties, including significant fines and suspension of degree granting privileges. Such mechanisms instill a culture of fear and an aversion to risk, resulting in prioritisation of regulatory compliance over the expression of academic freedom on the part of institutions, and on the part of faculty and students, expression is regulated to avoid sanctions.

The Failure of Reformism

The calls of government and civil society actors externally to “fix” the bill” and to engage in consultation or await a court ruling illustrate a deeper trap of considering systemic overall issues as the treating of technical issues. Any sort of reformism whether it be filing lawsuits or negotiating policies will always have its limitations when we consider the entire reorganization of the higher education system in the name of both castle-building and state-building. Genuine change cannot occur from creating exclusions in system that is, by its very essence, a system of unabashed commodification. Attempts to 'protect' autonomy through reform legitimizes the very commodification, centralization and managerialism that we seek to resist. This crisis of higher education is one of many manifestations of a class struggle that involves the production of knowledge, the (re)organization of labour, and the social reproduction of society. Under capitalism, universities are more than just educational institutions. They are an integral part of the system that reproduces the working class, certifies its members, and disciplines the thought of citizens so that it is available for the market. With the VBSA Bill, these functions of the university are intensified so that education is subordinated to regulatory, economic, and market-based calculations rather than democratic and humanistic purposes. The dissent of the teachers, students, and state government ministers is, in fact, a resistance to the violation of academic freedom and the infringement of the social right to education. If we see higher education under the VBSA Bill as a field to be managed and controlled, we must then consider its other, more radical, alternatives as a non-commodity, a collective social good.

These include the democratisation of governance, where faculty, students, and the community's involvement in the decision-making process becomes a priority. Also, public funding and the autonomy of governance, in which regulation can be disentangled from market imperatives. There are labour rights of academics which include the demands to end casualisation, restore tenure and extend academic freedom. There is equitable access of students by eliminating the obstacle of fees and the burden of debt. These demands are not reforms, and cannot be negotiated within the present confines. These demands are indicative of a struggle against the commodification of education.

Conclusion

The UGC Bill, now revamped to the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhikshan Bill, is much more than a legislative revision. It is, in fact, a fundamental strategic diversion in the way higher education is structured towards the centralisation, capitalist, and regulatory control of higher education. What is under threat is not just the administrative structure, it is the essence of the university as a site for the creation of knowledge, a space for freedom, and a site for democracy. In resisting the changes, students, teachers, and the community are not fighting a procedural battle. They are fighting for the vision of education as a public good, a space for liberation, and a site of class struggle.

Graphics from Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability