By Bhaskar Nath Biswal
The Modi government’s decision to send one Union Minister to one university every day, under what is being called the One Day, One University programme, is being pitched as a major outreach to India’s Gen Z. With over 1,300 universities in the country—57 Central, 522 State and the rest deemed-to-be or private—the scale of the exercise is genuinely ambitious. It comes, notably, in the aftermath of a police crackdown on protesting students that triggered a political storm and even cost Dharmendra Pradhan his post as Education Minister.
Read against that backdrop, the scheme looks less like routine constituency-style outreach and more like a course correction, an attempt to listen before the next round of student anger spills onto the streets.
There is much to welcome here. Indian universities have, for years, complained of a widening distance between policymakers in Delhi and the young people whose futures those policies shape. Welfare schemes are announced, curricula are revised and employment programmes are launched, but rarely does a Minister sit across the table from an ordinary student to hear, unfiltered, what is actually working and what is not. A structured, recurring visit of one university a day has the potential to close that gap. It signals that the government is willing to be present, not just to announce policy but also to be questioned on it. It also gives vice-chancellors and administrations a reason to keep their houses in order, since the prospect of ministerial scrutiny tends to concentrate institutional minds wonderfully.
The trouble lies not in the intention but in the execution. Indian campuses already run a punishing calendar of external programmes such as seminars, felicitations, sports events, NSS camps and placement drives, which are organised almost weekly or fortnightly, each one nibbling away at teaching days and instructional hours. Academic calendars are perpetually under strain, and faculty members already struggle to complete syllabi on time. A ministerial visit, however well-intentioned, is not a small addition to this calendar; it is a disruption of an entirely different order.
The moment a minister’s name is attached to a date, university authorities go into overdrive for at least three or four days beforehand—sprucing up buildings, rehearsing welcomes, vetting guest lists and drilling students on what to say and, more worryingly, what not to say. Ministers rarely travel alone. Personal staff, security details, local party functionaries and assorted well-wishers tend to accompany them, swelling a simple visit into a logistical event. By the time the formalities are done, the actual purpose of the visit—hearing the students’ voices—is often reduced to a stage-managed question or two, while the rest of the student body loses an entire working day standing in the sun or sitting through speeches that say little.
If this outreach is to mean anything, it must be redesigned around simplicity rather than ceremony. There is no need for a formal stage, a long guest list or elaborate welcome arrangements; a minister’s visit should be treated as a working meeting, not a public function. The most useful model would have the minister meet students separately, after regular class hours, preferably in the informality of the hostels, where young people speak more freely than they ever would in an auditorium ringed by cameras and college dignitaries.
A short, closed-door meeting with the faculty and administration, held either before classes begin or after they end, would allow candid institutional feedback without eating into teaching time. This single change—moving engagement out of classroom hours and away from formal halls—would ensure that the visit yields honest, usable information instead of a photo-op and that not a single student loses a day of instruction because a minister came to the campus.
Alongside the physical visits, the government would do well to institutionalise an online channel through which the concerned minister or a designated senior officer regularly invites written views from both staff and students on issues affecting campus life. Such a mechanism costs little, reaches every student rather than the handful who get near the microphone, and creates a continuous rather than an annual sense of being heard.
The One Day, One University scheme, in short, is a promising instinct in search of a disciplined format. Stripped of pomp, timed around the classroom rather than against it, and backed by a standing online feedback mechanism, it could become a genuine bridge between Gen Z and the government.
The writer is former college Principal and Founder of Supporting Shoulders