Chennai, Dec. 4: The national apex body of university and college teachers will oppose the Foreign Universities Entry and Operation Bill, as it believes that “WTO-inspired policies” in higher education would spell doom.

A group of ministers has cleared the controversial bill, which could be passed in the ongoing winter session of Parliament

The All India Federation of University and College Teachers’ Organisations said at the end of its 25th annual academic conference that any move to accentuate “privatisation and commercialisation of higher education” would be resisted as it was “anti-people and anti-student”.

Contrary to expectations that foreign universities would bring in investment into India, “they will come only to take away our money”, the apex body’s president, Professor Thomas Joseph, and its general secretary V.K. Tewary said. Private universities — not prestigious ones like Oxford or Cambridge — would like to come to India to make money by cashing in on their “brand name and teaching materials”, which Indian students could fall for, they added.

They claimed that this trend would only lead to “one-room private universities from Australia, USA, Canada and UK coming in and result in sub-standardisation of education”. Academic collaboration between Indian and foreign universities was welcome but not commercial tie-ups, which would reduce education to a commodity, they said, adding that such universities would even start “selling Ph.Ds for a tidy sum”.

The conference urged the Manmohan Singh government to fulfil its commitment made in the national common minimum programme to allocate 6 per cent of the GDP for education.