ABSTRACT
The Eleventh Five-Year Plan in India (2007–2012) stated three major objectives to be achieved in higher education, which will continue to remain relevant for years to come. The objectives are expansion, equity or inclusion, excellence or quality. Now there is a fourth one being referred to by the policy makers, the objective of employability. In a way, employability is partially linked to the question of excellence. Out of these, achieving excellence has possibly been the most daunting of all the challenges being faced in higher education in India today. Some of the reform measures which were mooted mainly in the form of bills sought to construct a regulated quasi-market for higher education to realize allocational efficiency, and the remaining reform measures focus on institutional governance to achieve technical efficiency and quality. One such reform measure in the area of institutional governance introduced in 2010 and amended in 2013, the Regulations (Government of India, 2010, 2013), has not yet received much attention from the experts and the stakeholders. The Regulations entail objective assessment of the teachers in the form of computation of what is called Academic Performance Indicator (API) under the proposed Performance-Based Appraisal System (PBAS). This policy initiative has far-reaching consequences for the objective of achieving excellence, the academic community, the university governance structure and the linkage between the university and the society. This governance improvement initiative is evidently in line with the neoliberal approach to institutional governance reform, which is being advocated and implemented in the majority of the countries both in the developing and in the developed countries (Musselin and Teixeira, 2014).
