Bringing IITs Under Ambit, Single-Point Data Entry & Mentoring of Institutions: Latest NAAC Report Highlights

Bringing the premier Indian Institutes of Technology under the ambit of the unified accreditation process, moving to a binary accreditation system, making the exercise “outcome-centric”, setting up a new body for data validation and verification, use of crowdsourcing for verifying data, single-point data entry through use of APIs, penalty for wrong-submissions and mentoring of institutions falling below standards are some of the major recommendations made by the Overarching Committee set up by the Centre to suggest reforms in the assessment and accreditation system of higher education institutions in the country. The committee set up last November is led by former Indian Space Research Organisation chief K Radhakrishnan, who at present is the chairperson of the Board of Governors at IIT-Kanpur and has officials and experts from various agencies and institutions, including University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education, Indian Institute of Technology, National Institute of Technology, representatives from state governments and universities, educators and computers science engineers, among others. “These reforms have been proposed with a strategic intent of creating a credible, objective and rationalised system for approval, accreditation and ranking of HEIs, with a verifiable and secured centralised database; technology-driven modern systems that could replace/minimise manual involvements and; mentoring and incentivising schemes for raising their participation as well as accreditation levels, towards global acclaim,” the report said. “There must be single point data entry by HEIs with provision for yearly updates, handling of collateral data and crowdsourcing for verification of input data and trust-enhancement measures, application programming interfaces for pushing data from varied sources into the centralised database that is being developed under ‘One Nation One Data ’ portal,” it said.