85% HEI do not have Accreditation; Government planning to review norms

NEW DELHI, SEPTEMBER 10: Despite making accreditation mandatory for higher education institutions to avail funding and autonomy, nearly 85 per cent of institutions are not coming forward to get themselves accredited. The Government is planning to review the existing accreditation process and make necessary changes.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has set the target to get all higher education institutions accredited by 2022, with a minimum score of 2.5 by the National Assessment & Accreditation Council (NAAC). Bringing out the state of accreditation in India, Higher Education Secretary, R. Subrahmanyam said that the biggest challenge before Government is that only 15 per cent institutions have accreditation and 85 per cent institutions are still not coming for accreditation.

Subrahmanyam said, “We need to review our accreditation system and need to change accordingly.”

The Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Prakash Javadekar also expressed dissatisfaction over the lesser number of institutions opting for accreditation. He said that there is need to cover each and every institution under accreditation but right now the number of accredited institutions is very less.

He said that that it may be for two reasons, first some institutions do not want to come under accreditation and second, there is some restriction in the existing accreditation mechanism, therefore, the Government wants to increase the strength of National Board of Accreditation (NBA) and NAAC so that larger number of institutions can be accredited.

To ease the burden of the existing two accreditation agencies, the UGC has recently decided to constitute an Accreditation Advisory Council (AAC), which will help the UGC set up more accreditation agencies.

UGC in its letter to Vice Chancellors said, “To enhance the existing capacity of accreditation for meeting the requirement of higher education institutes, it has been decided to allow more accreditation agencies to come into this sphere of activity.”

The Government is mulling changes in accreditation procedure and keeping the complexities involved in mind, it has asked the existing two agencies to give adequate time to the institutions to prepare for the same.

while suggesting to the NBA to give the boost to quality and accreditation the Minister said that if it working on the change in accreditation norms and regulations, it must give adequate time to the institutions for preparation.

The Minister said that ‘Ratings and Rankings’ both the quality hallmark for any educational institutions, therefore, accreditation becomes very important. The Minister said that ranking and rating increase competitiveness among institutions for better performance.

The Minister said that the Government is promoting expansion and autonomy of the institutions, it has declared Institutes of Eminence (IoE), which are completely autonomous institutions. Besides that, some institutions have given graded autonomy on the basis of NAAC and NBA rating.