After making a powerful pitch for the merger of nationwide stage engineering and medical entrances with the Common University Entrance Test (CUET-UG), the union authorities is now eager on additionally merging the accreditation (NAAC) and rating (NBA) our bodies.
While the National Assessment and Accreditation Council or NAAC is the one authorities company authorised to accredit universities and faculties, the National Board of Accreditation or NBA is tasked with accrediting solely technical training establishments. The latter can also be incharge of bringing out the annual rating of upper training establishments, often known as the NIRF, yearly.
The course of of making a single accreditation and rating system, one of many proposals of the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP), has begun with the Ministry of Education (MoE) organising a committee for a similar beneath Bhushan Patwardhan, chairman, government committee, National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
The transfer is critical because it comes towards the backdrop of a latest announcement by UGC chairman Jagadesh Kumar about merging the NEET, JEE Main with CUET-UG. The authorities can also be engaged on merging AICTE and UGC right into a single overarching greater training regulator known as the Higher Education Commission of India or HECI.
The NEP 2020 prescribes the “setting up a meta-accrediting body” known as the National Accreditation Council (NAC). At current, “accreditation and ranking of higher educational institutions takes place through multiple agencies and frameworks, which operate independent of each other. We have the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) that accredits technical programmes, while the NAAC accredits non-technical or general programmes. There is the National Institute of Ranking Framework (NIRF), which ranks all the higher educational institutions in India, said a source, adding: “The NEP envisages the creation of NAC, a body which will ensure the synchronized working of these bodies and align them to NEP goals”.
The committee headed by Patwardhan, who was the previous vice-chairman of the University Grants Commission (UGC), consists of Indranil Manna (vice-chancellor, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra in Ranchi), Ok N Ganesh (professor, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Tirupati), Dr Surender Prasad (former director, IIT Delhi), B J Rao (vice-chancellor, Central University of Hyderabad) and Dr Manju Singh (joint secretary, UGC). Singh would be the coordinator of the committee.
The six-member committee will research the accreditation methodology of NAAC , NBA and the rating system of the NIRF. It will advocate an acceptable mechanism to make sure communication between the our bodies, in addition to getting ready a framework to align the three to kind the proposed NAC.
The NEP notes that “accreditation of institutions will be based primarily on basic norms, public self-disclosure, good governance, and outcomes, and it will be carried out by an independent ecosystem of accrediting institutions supervised and overseen by NAC”.
It provides: “The task to function as a recognized accreditor shall be awarded to an appropriate number of institutions by NAC. In the short term, a robust system of graded accreditation shall be established, which will specify phased benchmarks for all HEIs to achieve set levels of quality, self-governance, and autonomy”.
Courtesy : Report Wire
