The central government on Wednesday notified the appointment of National Stock Exchange CEO and managing director Ashish Kumar Chauhan and Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu as members of the University Grants Commission (UGC), India’s regulator for higher education, taking the body’s strength to eight members from just four.
The Department of Higher Education in the Education Ministry also appointed Sachidananda Mohanty, former vice chancellor of the Central University of Odisha and serving vice chancellor of the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration Shashikala Gulabrao Wanjari to the Commission, with a tenure of three years, or till further orders.
As per the UGC Act of 1956, the Commission can have ten members, apart from the chairman and vice chairman, roles that are currently occupied by Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar and Deepak Kumar Srivastava, respectively. Of the remaining ten members, two are required to be central government officials. These roles are occupied by Higher Education Secretary Sanjay Murthy and Additional Secretary in the Expenditure Department of the Finance Ministry, Sanjay Prasad.
While the Commission didn’t have any other members beyond these four till the latest appointments, the law states that not less than four of the remaining eight members should be person who are teaching at universities at the time of their selection.
For the remaining four members, the law permits choosing persons who have knowledge of, or experience in, agriculture, commerce, forestry or industry, or who are part of the engineering, legal, medical or any other learned profession. These members can also include vice-chancellors of Universities that are not teachers but are educationists of repute or have obtained high academic distinctions in the government’s opinion.
Mr. Chauhan, apart from being the NSE CEO and MD, is also a Chancellor of the University of Allahabad.
Mr. Vembu has a doctorate in electrical engineering from Princeton University and is the founder and CEO at Zoho, a cloud-based business software firm.
