Which one of the following Councils has been disbanded in 2013 ?

Concept: Indian education is regulated by a set of bodies with largely distinct mandates — statutory regulation of a profession, curriculum research and advisory support, and assessment or accreditation of institutions. The legal instrument that creates a body also fixes how it can be wound up: a council created under a parent university’s own statute ceases to exist once that statute is repealed and its function is reassigned, whereas a council created by its own Act of Parliament continues until that Act is amended or repealed. So the way to identify a council that ceased to exist is to find the one whose regulatory function was transferred to another regulator.

Application to this question. The function under review here is the regulation of open and distance learning (ODL). The sequence was:

1. The Distance Education Council was created in 1991 under Statute 28 framed under the Indira Gandhi National Open University Act, 1985, so it functioned as an organ of IGNOU rather than as an independent statutory regulator.

2. The committee headed by Prof. N. R. Madhava Menon (2010) reviewed this arrangement, held that a university should not regulate other universities, and recommended a separate regulator for distance education.

3. No new council was created. IGNOU repealed Statute 28 in 2013, and the Department of Higher Education memorandum of 16 May 2013 recorded that the Distance Education Council stood dissolved and placed the regulation of open and distance learning programmes with the University Grants Commission and, for technical programmes, the All India Council for Technical Education, within their respective jurisdictions.

4. The UGC discharged the transferred function through its Distance Education Bureau and the UGC (Open and Distance Learning) Regulations.

Cross-check with the other councils. The remaining three bodies kept their mandates and their creating instruments in 2013:

• National Council for Teacher Education — functioned as an advisory body from 1973 and became a statutory body on 17 August 1995 under the NCTE Act, 1993; regulates teacher education and was not affected.

• National Council of Educational Research and Training — an autonomous body from 1961; conducts research and prepares curriculum frameworks and textbooks for school education.

• National Assessment and Accreditation Council — created in 1994 by the UGC under Section 12(ccc) of the UGC Act, 1956; assesses and accredits higher education institutions.

Result: the council disbanded in 2013 was the Distance Education Council (DEC), whose regulatory role over open and distance learning passed to the University Grants Commission.