Delhi Has Reserved 25% of a University Nobody Has Built

There are schools in Delhi where nobody attends class. A student finishes Class 10 somewhere else, enrols in one of them, spends the next two years in a coaching centre, and sits his board exams on attendance that was written rather than earned. What those two years buy is a status. At the end of them he counts as a Delhi student, eligible for the 85 per cent quota that holds roughly six seats in every seven at the universities this city runs. In January last year a bench led by Chief Justice D K Upadhyaya called the practice a “fraud” and ordered inspections, and the CBSE said it had already acted against more than three hundred such schools nationwide.

Now set beside him a boy whose family has lived in Rohini for twelve years, and who finished school across the line in Gurugram because that was the school his parents could afford. In 2022 the High Court told him he did not qualify. The quota follows the location of the school, not the residence of the student. So schooling here can be bought by someone who has never lived here, and living here counts for nothing without it. Once two years of Delhi schooling are worth a university seat, that schooling stops being a record of where a child studied and becomes an asset worth manufacturing, and somebody will always set up to manufacture it.

On Friday the Delhi Cabinet cleared the draft Private Universities Bill. Among other things it reserves 25 per cent of seats in every course for Delhi students, admitted under the government’s existing quota policy, which is the policy described above.

The courts have already flagged this. In Ujjwal Shori v University of Delhi, decided in September 2023, a division bench upheld the rules and then warned that they could exclude bona fide students with a legitimate claim to residence in Delhi. It directed the government to revisit them, and recorded that the Assembly was considering an amendment to build residence into the definition. Three years on the definition is unchanged, and the government is extending it to a new class of universities.

Ashish Sood has put his finger on a real grievance. Delhi is where the country’s children come to prepare for their exams, and where Delhi’s own children leave to take a degree. The bill carries real money for the families who felt that most, since the poorest students inside the local quarter pay no fees at all. People who dislike quotas tend to go quiet about who gets through the door. But the waiver and the quarter run on different principles. One helps a family that cannot pay, the other a family that was already here, and a child does not become poorer because her school stood five kilometres the wrong side of a boundary.

A quarter of what?

Count what the quarter is a quarter of. The UGC’s list of private universities runs past four hundred institutions. Gujarat has sixty-five and Rajasthan fifty-three. Delhi does not appear on it at all, because the capital of India has no law under which a private university can be founded, and that absence is the whole reason Friday’s bill exists.

Then subtract again. Article 30 gives religious and linguistic minorities the right to run their own institutions, and in P A Inamdar the Supreme Court held that a state cannot impose its admission quotas on private unaided colleges. Maharashtra has lived with this for years, and its minority institutions sit outside the state quota, filling up to 51 per cent of their seats from their own community. Delhi’s quarter will therefore reach some universities and not others. That is a constitutional guarantee working as designed, and the arithmetic holds regardless. A quarter of the seats the rule can reach is smaller than a quarter of the seats in Delhi.

Dummy schools counterfeit a Delhi childhood. A reserved quarter counterfeits a seat that nobody has built, and of the two frauds it is the more expensive, because it is legal and nobody will be inspected for it.

The test worth carrying out of this week’s news is whether a rule changes who gets in or how many get in. Share rules are cheap and can be announced from a podium. Buildings are slow, and they open long after the minister has moved on. So the quarter led every headline on Friday, while the clause that will decide whether Delhi’s children stay in Delhi ran somewhere down the page. That clause declines to require the traditional land-hungry campus and allows multi-storey urban ones instead. Ashoka went to Sonipat and Shiv Nadar to Greater Noida because Haryana and Uttar Pradesh had both a law permitting private universities and land to build on, and Delhi had neither.

It is also where the quarter starts to matter more than it looks. A rule about who gets a seat can be written before a single seat exists, and anyone weighing a campus in Delhi against one in Sonipat will read it as part of the price of coming. Reserve a quarter of a university that already stands and you have moved seats around. Reserve a quarter of one that does not, and you have changed the odds it gets built, which is an odd thing to do inside a law meant to get things built.

The quarter also protects a narrower group than the phrase “Delhi students” suggests: the families already inside Delhi’s school system, along with the operators who have learned to manufacture entry into it. Roughly three in ten people here came from another state and built the place while they were at it, and a rule that sorts their children by which side of a line a school stood on will feel fair mainly to whoever has already cleared it.

So there is a figure worth watching over the next five years, and it is not 25. It is how many campuses open. Until one does, the boy whose attendance was invented and the boy whose neighbourhood was real are competing for a quarter of a university that does not exist.

A quarter of what?

Share rules are cheap; buildings are slow