The University Grants Commission (UGC) on January 27, 2024, issued major reforms in the Accreditation of Higher Education Institutions.
The preliminary report of the committee was placed on the Government of India website for public consultation. The final report, incorporating several feedbacks received from stakeholders, was presented to the Hon’ble Minister of Education, Government of India and the same was accepted by the Minister on January 16, 2024.
The recommendation also focuses on mentoring and incentivizing schemes for raising their participation as well as accreditation levels, towards eminence, significance and global acclaim.
The following are the salient features of the recommendations:
• Binary Accreditation (Either accredited or not accredited) rather than grades with an aim to encourage all the institutions to get on-boarded in the accreditation process thereby creating a quality culture in the higher education system.
• Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation (Level 1 to 5) to encourage accredited Institutions to raise their bar, continuously improve, evolve in-depth or in-breadth in disciplines from ‘Level 1’ to ‘Level 4’ as Institutions of National Excellence, and then to ‘Level-5’ i.e. Institutions of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education.
• One Nation One Data Platform has been proposed as part of the reform to ensure integrity and transparency in handing institutional data. The new platform shall capture superset of data from HEIs for varied purposes (approval, accreditation, ranking) with an in-built design for collateral cross-checking to check the authenticity of data.
By implementing all the recommendations comprehensively before the end of 2024, the Indian higher education system will be transforming, enhancing the quality and credibility of Indian institutions.
