Panel formed to develop roadmap for National Accreditation Council
The Hindu
The announcement came in the wake of reports regarding doubts about NAAC’s accreditation process, says S.C. Sharma, its director
The University Grants Commission (UGC) has constituted a committee under the chairmanship of Bhushan Patwardhan to prepare a roadmap for developing the National Accreditation Council. It will work along with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF).
Another committee under the chairmanship of M.K. Sridhar, member of UGC, will deal with issues related to accreditation of higher educational institutions (HEIs). A third committee under the chairmanship of Surender Prasad, former chairman of NBA and director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, has been constituted to rationalise the current system of recognition, accreditation and ranking of HEIs by multiple agencies.
The announcements came in the wake of reports regarding doubts about NAAC’s accreditation process, said S.C. Sharma, its director.
In a three-page letter Mr. Sharma explained that peer team members are chosen based on their acceptance, the types of HEIs to be accredited, the types of programmes and courses offered by HEIs, and the relevance of the specialisation of experts.
According to him as much as 67% of the 4,686 assessors in the NAAC database had accepted the peer team visit invitations. The others who did not, included those who had not completed their profile or were unavailable or had dropped out for various reasons.
Mr. Sharma averred that the entire process of accreditation and assessment is transparent, robust and automated. The process is decentralised, transparent and accessible to stakeholders through user-friendly dashboards at all stages, he said.
The process of awarding grades to HEIs undergoes four steps - submission of peer team report with grade; scrutiny by standing committee; declaration of results by NAAC; and ratification of results by the executive committee, which do not permit manipulation of the process, he said.
In 2021, five women from Mayithara, four of them MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) workers, found a common ground in their desire to create a sustainable livelihood by growing vegetables. Rajamma M., Mary Varkey, Valsala L., Elisho S., and Praseeda Sumesh, aged between 70 and 39, pooled their savings, rented a piece of land and began their collective vegetable farming journey under the Deepam Krishi group.