The West Bengal government has passed a bill in a special session of the assembly, concerning the inter-university transfer of faculty, officers and other staff of state-aided universities and the control of provident fund of employees by the government. The Universities and Colleges (Administration & Regulation) Amendment Bill, 2026, came after an amendment of an earlier Bill related to the transfer of faculties of undergraduate colleges which was passed in 2017. This was just extended to include post graduate faculties who are also in charge of research and supervision of doctoral and post-doctoral theses of students in various streams of knowledge. The law met a strong resistance from faculty members’ associations in state-aided universities as well as from research scholars. What has gone wrong in the knowledge building system in the state? Bengal is a state where the state-aided public higher education system had thrived for a long period. Public-funded higher education was a thrust area in the human development policy of the Left Front government in the state. Even after 2011, the government under Trinamul Congress extended the system with the setting up of more public funded universities. At present there are 31 public universities in the state. However, without building infrastructure and recruiting faculties many of these universities are not in a great condition when it comes to each indicator of the knowledge-building system.West Bengal has always boasted of a pool of devoted students and researchers in the physical as well as the social sciences and languages, who have catered to the knowledge building process of the entire country, as well as the globe. People of the state also showed more reliance on public funded universities and several colleges affiliated to these universities. This was a major reason for underdeveloped private universities in this state in contrast to the other states of India. A huge demand for higher education was already observed but the booming market of private profit in higher education was significantly less compared to many states of the country. There was, also, an outflux of students from the state who went to many institutes in other states. So, while the demand of higher education and the prospect of profiteering in higher education was evident in the state, this prospect could not be captured due to the existence of giant public universities.Campuses of higher education, mainly two dominant campuses of Jadavpur University and Calcutta University along with Rabindrabharati University, Bardhaman University, Kalyani University, North Bengal University, and Presidency College (and now University) were pretty old and acclaimed in the academic community. The other universities also followed similar lines. The campuses exhibited vibrant debates engaging students, teachers and researchers, and they were not tamed by any political party ruling the state or the country. Like most of the knowledge-building campuses in the world, the academic community is always dominated by Left-leaning intellectuals with many of them getting involved in public debates. Universities are essentially breeding grounds of public intellectuals in almost all countries of the globe, with Bengal no exception. During the later period of Left Front rule in the state, it was this university community again who wanted a change in the rule. Again, it is the university community which did not move unequivocally to Trinamul Congress, which angered the regime. Recruitment to the universities was frozen.The earlier version of this Bill also met with several court cases and was stalled. The reason given for such transfers was even distribution of faculty members across all universities. Mentioning the glowing examples of Jadavpur, Calcutta, Presidency and acknowledging that a few universities had excellent faculty while many in the remote districts do not revealed the acceptance of state reluctance in bolstering state universities with state funding and faculty recruitment.ResearchApproximately 30% of teaching positions are vacant in Jadavpur University and 60% of teaching positions are vacant in Calcutta University, making it near to impossible to run courses with earlier specialisations and thrust areas along with supervision of doctoral thesis. There is a UGC restriction on number of supervisions per faculty members. Inter university transfers of faculty members will not alter the total number of faculty members operating in all the state universities pooled together. But this pattern of job scheduling of total faculty members has a denial and disregard of research projects and research supervision by faculty members. Universities hardly depend on state funded research, but faculty members constantly engage in interaction within research community located in many other institutions and build up laboratories, libraries, data centres with funded research projects catering to many students and researchers. Faculty members cannot be transferred along with their whole baggage of research infrastructure and team. This is the reason why faculty members in universities are not transferred anywhere in the country. While presenting the Bill, a reference was given to inter-university transfers in Kerala, Karnataka and elsewhere, but in these examples, the transfer is restricted to college teachers who consent to transfer, in limited spaces. Transfers of university teachers will definitely severely disturb research in the universities, which may have been the intended desire of the policy. Research under New Education Policy is centralised and independent knowledge building is definitely not in the eye of the current state viewpoint. However, even if teaching is considered, simple reallocation can never be a substitute of new recruitment. Scarcity of teachers will eventually become a shared tragedy of all the state-funded universities. AutonomyScarcity of faculty members definitely implies a scarcity of researchers and then students, which would facilitate the natural death of public-funded universities. The universities are governed by their respective Acts and Statutes. Each university has its own Act and are autonomous. They have their own independent recruitment and career advancement processes although the state and Chancellor. State government and the Chancellor have their representatives in these administrative bodies, but the institutions are autonomous. It is difficult to implement transfers among employees recruited on different terms by several autonomous bodies. Intra-transfers within universities are there among college teachers, but again, with consent. Intra-university transfers of faculty members were justified on the floor of the assembly as a step of vengeance for not succumbing to the ruling dispensation and mostly abiding by left ideology. So, the transfers were justified less on academic grounds but more on punitive measures on faculty members who allegedly question the rulers. The inter-university transfer bill intended an environment of threat which can imply a flight of faculty members and researchers out of public funded universities to private institutions within or outside the state, causing natural death of universities with accelerated speed. Knowing fully the legacy of the knowledge-building process as never to be tamed by electoral swings, academic pursuit without reason is never to be expected. The Bill has to be introduced with an undertone of threat to withhold the autonomy and independence of academic pursuit, to thwart scientific temper and to control research so that no question to the present regime can be asked. This was made clear while the Bill was presented. Privatisation and commercialisation of teaching and research in higher education, in a way, can give rise to a community who can be tamed by rulers of the state, the new Bill hopes. However, it has always been difficult, historically, to stall the knowledge-building procedure and the urge to question rulers. The new Bill in Bengal may be a threatening call, maybe it will stall academics momentarily, but knowledge building is an incessant process and therefore, is unputdownable. Ishita Mukhopadhyay is professor, Department of Economics, University of Calcutta.