Indicate the number of Regional Offices of University Grants Commission of…

Concept — A national regulator decentralises its work by notifying a fixed set of Regional Offices, each holding jurisdiction over a demarcated block of states and union territories. The size of such a network is a matter of official record: it is read off the parent body's own notified list, and not inferred from the number of zones, the number of states, or the number of institutions the body funds.

Application — The University Grants Commission publishes that notified list in its Annual Report. The Annual Report for 2010-11, the year of this paper, records that the Commission has established seven Regional Offices, at Hyderabad, Pune, Bhopal, Guwahati, Kolkata, Bangalore and Delhi, for implementing its college-sector schemes, and tabulates them as follows.

Counting the rows of that notified list gives six offices set up outside Delhi between 1994 and 1999, together with the Northern Regional College Bureau at Delhi, which the same list carries with an establishment date of 25.09.2001, that is 6 + 1 = 7.

Cross-check — A figure of six is often quoted in general summaries, because they list only the offices located outside Delhi and leave out the Northern Regional College Bureau, which works from the UGC's own premises at 35 Ferozeshah Road, New Delhi. Six is not among the four counts offered here. The jurisdiction map settles the matter, because that Delhi bureau is the unit the notified list assigns to the whole northern block:

• Jammu and Kashmir

• Himachal Pradesh

• Punjab

• Chandigarh

• Haryana

• Uttar Pradesh

• Uttarakhand

A network of only six units would leave that entire block outside every office's jurisdiction.

Answer — 07 Regional Offices.