The education ministry is working on a system to bring the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) under the ambit of the unified accreditation process just like the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which is the existing agency that grades India’s colleges and universities.
Replacing the current eight-point system followed by the NAAC to a binary accreditation system with just three outcome categories instead of NAAC grades and scores.
This will simplify the process and reduce the periodicity of the accreditation cycle from five years to three.
It also proposes accreditation based on the institution type rather than a one-size-fits-all policy.
The aim is to move 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 (HEIs) in the country.
A Union government committee has recommended that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) be brought under the ambit of a proposed overarching agency that will be tasked with grading all higher educational institutes and courses across the country by the end of this year.
According to the report of the committee, led by IIT council standing committee chairperson K Radhakrishnan, the recommendation has received “in-principle” approval from the IITs, which have so far never been accredited by the NAAC.
Currently, IITs follow their internal systems for periodic peer evaluation and assessment of programmes.
For bringing in all IITs under the ambit of the unified accreditation process and-principle adoption of the National Credit Framework, a presentation of the proposed reforms was made to the Council of IITs in its 55th meeting held at IIT Bhubaneswar on 18 April 2023," states the report, made public on Friday.
Led by Radhakrishnan, who is also the chairperson of the IIT Kanpur Board of Governors, the committee had IIM Ahmedabad Director Bharat Bhasker and Vice-Chancellor of Assam’s Mahapurusha Srimanta Sankaradeva Viswavidyalaya Mridul Hazarika as members.
Set up in November 2022, the panel also held consultations with the UGC, AICTE among other bodies.
The committee has noted that the report will now be circulated among all the 23 IITs, and taken up in the next meeting of the IIT council, which is the apex consultative body of the premier engineering institutes.
The committee has also made several other recommendations, including the adoption of an “adapted Binary Accreditation System”.
Currently, NAAC follows an eight-point grading system under which institutes are rated A++, A+, A, B++, B+, B, C and D based on data submitted by institutes and their verification by expert teams during campus visits.
A committee set up by former NAAC chairperson Bhushan Patwardhan had flagged irregularities in the prevailing system, particularly with respect to such expert teams.
