NAAC Scam: ‘Corruption on this scale impossible without inside help’

NEW DELHI : Is the National Assessment and Accreditation Council’s (NAAC) corruption problem restricted to just one team of peer reviewers? An official who worked closely with the body believes the problem goes deeper and that corruption on this scale wouldn’t be possible without the collusion of official/s within NAAC.

On February 3, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested 10 people, including members of a NAAC inspection committee, for seeking bribes from a private Andhra Pradesh deemed-to-be University in exchange for higher grading. NAAC’s chairperson, Anil Sahasrabudhe has told media that the 10 members have been barred from the body for good and that a probe has been initiated.

The NAAC is an autonomous body that assesses and accredits higher education institutions; it is funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC). A lot rides on the grades it awards institutions – possibility of autonomy for regulations, funds under central schemes and more. While Sahasrabudhe told The Times of India that reviews by the members of the peer team are being put on hold, there is no clarity on how many reviews and assessments might be tainted.

As the source described it, even though the system is automated in the selection of peer reviewers and composition of teams, some degree of discretion is there with NAAC authorities.

A small body, the NAAC functions through its general council (GC) and executive committee (EC) comprising educational administrators, policy makers and senior academics from across India’s higher education system. The GC president is the UGC chairman, currently, M Jagadesh Kumar; the EC is chaired by Sahasrabudhe, also head of National Education Technology Forum (NETF). Both were asked about the reviewers participation in visits and the probe but they did not respond.

The director is the academic and administrative head of NAAC and member-secretary of both GC and EC.

On February 10, the NAAC changed its accreditation process and adopted reforms recommended over a year ago by the Radhakrishnan committee.

NAAC Bribery Scam: Becoming an assessor

The NAAC invites applications from academics across the country to become assessors; this process is online. They are then composed into peer teams and sent across to institutions.

“Application is invited and following some review the application is approved. There isn't a high degree of human intervention in peer team selection. It is automated and small discretion is only possible," said the source.

“The only rule is that the person who is an assessor should not be from the same place where the inspection is taking place. If the person is from Karnataka he cannot go for an inspection to colleges/institutions in that state,” he added.

A key functionary at the heart of the NAAC scandal was a Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, professor, in its management department, and the university being assessed was the Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (KLEF) Deemed University in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh.

NAAC grade and peer review team

The assessors are informed online about the visits they have been assigned. Each of the assessors is provided with login credentials.

Three days prior to the visit, the college or institution expecting a visit finds out who the members of the peer review team are.

In the case of colleges, a peer review team has three members; in the case of universities, it ranges between five and seven, depending on the size of the institution.

“As it is decided by the authorities at NAAC, the assessors can be repeated again. Either the same group or different combination of people can be there,” said the source.

According to them, there is no fixed policy on how many reviews an assessor may participate in, the frequency of such visits or how many times the same set of people might be thrown together into a team.

Asked if the same team of reviewers may have gone to other colleges, they said: “Even if the entire team may not be the same, it could have been a mix. It can happen sometimes an assessor may get a chance repeatedly or his chance may not come at all.”

He added NAAC prefers peer reviewers who are under 70 years old, implying most are active academics.

“Without somebody from inside helping, such a scale of corruption could not have happened. If this is not dealt with an iron hand now also it will keep on coming back thus tainting the integrity of the council itself,” he said.

A former principal, who has been part of these NAAC visits, said, “It is the authorities at NAAC who constitute the team, the assessors have no role in it. At the max, we can either accept or reject the visit.” He has been to several institutions as peer assessor.

Each institution spends around Rs 2.5-3 lakh for the accreditation process.

In 2023, the NAAC chairman of the EC, Bhushwan Patwardhan resigned alleging that some higher education institutions were obtaining higher grades through unfair means. Then, NAAC had vehemently defended its processes, claiming that they are transparent. That said, the link to a dashboard on the NAAC website for tracking visits of peer-review teams has been saying “something went wrong” for weeks.

After Patwardhan’s resignation, the government had constituted a committee headed by K Radhakrishnan which proposed accreditation reforms in two phases – “binary accreditation” and “maturity-based accreditation”.

Launch of binary accreditation

On February 10, NAAC issued a statement and said that as per Dr. Radhakrishnan Committee recommendations, NAAC has proposed launching the Basic (Binary) Accreditation in April-May 2025, followed by Maturity-Based Graded Levels (MBGL).

“Special committees are working on the preparation of framework and methodology for MBGL,” said the statement.

It said that any institution which has already applied for the accreditation and wishes to continue as per the existing Revised Accreditation Framework (RAF), peer team assessment will be carried out through an “online mode” for colleges and “hybrid mode” (online and physical) in case of universities.