New Delhi: A government-appointed panel has recommended that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) come under the ambit of a single umbrella body for accreditation and ranking of higher education institutions (HEIs), instead of conducting internal peer review.
This is part of a larger government effort to streamline the process of accreditation and ranking by establishing ‘One Nation One Data (ONOD)’, under which all the data sought from education institutions would be uploaded on a single platform.
“The process of encouraging IITs to migrate from their internal peer review system to an appropriate national accreditation one is on the anvil,” reads the pane’s report, made public last week.
The Ministry of Education had in November 2022 set up a committee chaired by Dr K. Radhakrishnan, chairperson of the board of governors of IIT-Kanpur, with professor Mridul Hazarika, vice-chancellor of Assam’s Mahapurusha Srimanta Sankaradeva Viswavidyalaya, and IIM-Lucknow professor Bharat Bhaskar, among others, as members.
The committee consulted stakeholders from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the University Grants Commission (UGC), the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), National Board of Accreditation (NBA), among others, to come up with the plan for an umbrella body for accreditation and ranking.
The report is available online for a month for feedback and suggestions from the public and other stakeholders.
Currently, there are multiple agencies for the accreditation of institutions. Apart from the UGC, which grants recognition to institutions, there is NAAC, which does assessment and a graded accreditation of HEIs at the institution level, over 5-year periods.
The NBA does binary accreditation of programmes in technical disciplines for either 6-year or 3-year periods. The AICTE does the mandatory annual approval of all programmes/courses in technical educational institutions etc.
The IITs conduct their own internal peer review, which does not involve any of these agencies.
The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranks higher education institutions.
The idea behind a single regulator is to avoid the numerous agencies and overlap. A single regulator has been proposed in the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The committee set up by the ministry consulted on ways in which the proposal could be translated into action. It has given a step-by-step timeline for various agencies to eventually transition to a new accreditation system by December 2023.
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Panel’s recommendations
The panel has proposed setting up of a “credible, objective and rationalised” system for approval, accreditation and ranking of HEIs, “with a verifiable and secured centralised database, technology-driven modern systems that could replace/minimise manual involvements”.
It has also recommended “mentoring and incentivising schemes for raising HEIs participation as well as accreditation levels, towards eminence, significance and global acclaim”, the report reads.
About the IITs, the report says, “It may be recalled that, currently, IITs follow their internal systems for periodic peer evaluation and assessment of programmes.
“For bringing in all IITs under the ambit of the unified accreditation process and in-principle adoption of the National Credit Framework, a presentation of the proposed reforms was made to the Council of IITs in its 55th meeting held at IIT Bhubaneswar on 18 April, 2023. Their acceptance in principle was gained,” the report adds.
On ONOD, the committee suggests that all the data by education institutions should be uploaded on a single platform for assessment by the umbrella regulator.
“The ONOD platform will allow for singular capture of all the information sought from HEIs and will enable the sharing of only relevant data fields to approval and accreditation agencies,” the report added.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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