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NAAC will introduce a Maturity-Based Graded Levels system by February-end, phasing out physical inspections to reduce corruption, with penalties for false data.
The Council also plans to engage with higher education departments of states to appraise them of planned reforms in accreditation.
Having once again come under the scanner for alleged “corrupt” practices, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been working on reforms and is set to come out with its new grading policy – Maturity-Based Graded Levels – recommended last year by an expert panel, by February-end, which will phase out physical inspections.
Anil D Sahasrabudhe, chairperson, NAAC Executive Committee, speaking to News18, said that the reforms have been in the process and that the “Council plans to roll out the Maturity-Based Graded Levels system most likely by February-end”.
“This is one of the major reforms that NAAC has been working on. Once the Maturity-Based Graded Levels accreditation system is in place, it will weed out any scope of illicit activities since it will involve stakeholder validation,” he said.
Stakeholders such as people from the industry will be integrated as part of the accreditation and ranking process. “The system will be data-driven with no or minimal expert visits to an institution for verification. Also, to ensure that the data is authentic, heavy penalties will be levied for any wrong data submissions by the institutions,” he said.
Maturity-Based Graded Levels accreditation means multiple levels of grading – level 1-5 – 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.’
He said that work on the new accreditation format is underway. “We have a brainstorming session scheduled on February 16-17 where 40-50 experts will gather to discuss the new format. Probably, the new maturity-based graded levels format will be evolved by the end of this month and will even be rolled out this month-end itself. It will be a robust system where all stakeholders will be able to have cent per cent trust and confidence in its work,” said Sahasrabudhe.
The reforms were announced in a report of the Overarching Committee headed by former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan in January 2024. The report titled ‘Reforms for Strengthening Assessment and Accreditation in Higher Education Institutions,” was submitted to and approved by the union Ministry of Education (MoE).
On Saturday, members of NAAC’s inspection committee were arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) allegedly for ‘bribery’ for granting favourable ratings to a university. This comes in less than two years after the Council ran into a controversy for alleged irregularities in February 2023.
The Council also plans to engage with higher education departments of states to appraise them of planned reforms in accreditation to ensure most institutions can participate in the new accreditation process.
Even though there have been attempts by the grading body to make accreditation mandatory, it is still largely voluntary with only 30-40 per cent of all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the country applying for accreditation.
From July 2024 itself, NAAC stopped taking any new applications under the old methodology of accrediting. Institutions are accredited for a period of five years, during which they are required to have consistent performance across parameters.
Under the existing methodology, institutions apply for accreditation and submit a self-study report with details of both quantitative (such as number of faculty, students etc) and qualitative data (research papers, performance etc). This set of data is then validated by NAAC’s expert teams, followed by on-site evaluations from peer assessors.
The said reforms are in line with the NEP that envisages a transparent system for ranking and accreditation for all higher education institutions in India.
