Against the suggestions from the National Planning Commission and the Policy Research Institute, the government has decided to approve a new university without properly assessing the need for one.

A Cabinet meeting on Tuesday decided to present a bill on Sahid Dashrath Chand University of Health Sciences in Parliament. The government is preparing to register another bill in the House while the one to set up the University of Nepal has been pending for around a year in the federal parliament.

The government had been preparing to set up a medical college in Kailali as per its commitment to having one public medical school in each province. However, following local protests in June, the government made a commitment to setting up a university instead of the medical college. This would take the number of federal universities to 14.

"I am not against the establishment of specialised universities. However, I doubt if there is a need for a separate medical university in the far west," Kamal Krishna Joshi, a former chairperson of the University Grants Commission, told the Post. "Delivering quality education while also ensuring job opportunities to the graduates is more important than adding the number of the varsities."

Joshi, a former vice chancellor at Tribhuvan University, said there must be a proper need assessment, clarity in funding modality and administrative structure before deciding to add a new university.

A clearance from the University Grants Commission is necessary for formulating the law to establish a new university. Dev Raj Adhikari, chairperson of the Grants Commission, said they had consented to the new medical university.

The commission's consent, however, contradicts its own recommendation.

Amid a competition between the federal and provincial governments to set up new universities, a high-level task force at the commission had suggested that new universities should be added only after a needs assessment and by developing objective criteria.

The taskforce led by Pushpa Raman Wagle, a member of the National Planning Commission, last year suggested that “the government formulate an umbrella law, which would lay the mechanism to make suggestions to the government on higher education, before adding new universities”. The report also said that the universities and deemed universities established by the provinces have neither proper criteria nor monitoring mechanisms.

Asked if the consent to establish a new university without proper study was against the spirit of Wagle's recommendation, a senior official at the commission said, "The government was determined to add a new university, which we can’t reject as a state agency."

A March report by the Policy Research Institute, a government think tank, said it seemed impractical to establish new universities while existing ones had not functioned effectively.

The largest university in the country, Tribhuvan University, has enough students but is poorly managed and lags behind in delivering quality education. Other universities are seeing shortfalls in enrolment and have not excelled at management or satisfying student expectations, the report mentions.

For instance, the Lumbini Buddhist University, which came into operation in 2004, is struggling to attract students—just 823 got enrolled in 2021-22, as per a report by the Grants Commission. The state of Nepal Sanskrit University is no better. The country’s second-oldest university has around 2,500 students.

Before the second people’s movement in 2006, the country had only six universities—Tribhuvan University, Mahendra Sanskrit University [currently Nepal Sanskrit University], Kathmandu University, Pokhara University, Lumbini Buddhist University and Purbanchal University. With the larger goal of diversifying and decentralising higher education, the government in 2010 established three more universities—Far-Western University, Mid-Western University and the Agriculture and Forestry University (AFU) in central Nepal.

They were followed by two more—Nepal Open University and Rajarshi Janak University—taking the total to 11. In its last term, Parliament also endorsed Madan Bhandari University of Science and Technology and Yogmaya Vidushi Ayurveda University by passing their Acts. In addition to 13 central universities and six academies of health sciences, which are also considered deemed universities, the provincial governments too are competing in the establishment of new universities and health sciences academies. Gandaki Provincial University, Madhesh Agriculture University and Madhesh University are already in operation, while Province 1 has endorsed a law to set up Manmohan Industrial University. Lumbini Technological University is in the offing.

Besides, Madhesh Academy of Health Sciences and Madan Bhandari Academy of Health Sciences are in the pipeline. Separately, the National Defence University is on course to operate.