NITTTRs in Bhopal, Kolkata, Chennai, Chandigarh declared deemed universities

NEW DELHI: Four National Institutes of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTRs) have been granted deemed-to-be university status under the distinct category. The Ministry of Education, on recommendation of the University Grants Commission (UGC), declared NITTTR Bhopal, NITTTR Kolkata, NITTTR Chennai, and NITTTR Chandigarh as institutions deemed-to-be universities subject to fulfillment of certain conditions.

The deemed universities will have to fulfill conditions such as starting new programmes in collaboration with top institutes, commencing research and doctoral programmes, taking steps to get courses and institute rated for valid accreditation by the National Board of Accreditation and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), participating in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings, and create Academic Bank of Credit (ABC) IDs for students, among others.

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In four separate notifications, it was informed that online applications were submitted on the UGC portal by the four institutions for conferment of the deemed university status under de-novo category, now called as distinct category.

The commission examined the applications through its expert committee in accordance with Institutions Deemed to be Universities regulations, 2019. After overall assessment, the committee recommended that a Letter of Intent (LoI) may be issued to the institutes with certain conditions. The recommendations of the UGC expert committee was considered and approved by the commission in its 550th meeting.

While UGC replaced the old regulations with new ones, the teacher training institutes requested for consideration of applications. Thereby, MoE on UGC’s advice granted the LoIs to the institutes for fulfilment of conditions within a period of three years. The NITTTRs then submitted their compliance reports which were verified by the UGC expert committee. The expert committee accepted the reports and the commission approved them in its 577th meeting held in February this year.