The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) in its analysis of accredited higher education institutions (HEIs) in Maharashtra has suggested appropriate measures by the state government for a recruitment drive in order to help the HEIs to survive, liberalized policy for faculty recruitment, free higher education for girls to boost gender equity and universities may shift their role to facilitator from the controller and from administrator to mentor for affiliated colleges and HEIs.
In its 192 page analysis, NAAC has said that Maharashtra is the second largest state which is having the highest number of accreditation of HEIs by it next to Karnataka. The state has been putting great effort in spread of higher education in pre-independent India and it has tremendous scope for improvement of all quality parameters in higher education.
NAAC has suggested that the state government should insist upon industry to form linkages with the educational academy. ‘’Paucity of funding is all-pervading in colleges and HEIs. The CSR activity is mandatory for the industry but universities, colleges, and HEIs are excluded from its scope. The government should ask the industry to earmark some percentage of its funds for colleges and universities. Regulations may be passed in this context,’’ said NAAC.
Further, NAAC has suggested reinstatement of the erstwhile non-salary maintenance grant. If colleges are to have state of the art equipment it cannot be done without adequate funding which is expected to flow from the government.
According to NAAC, there is a crying need to expand the curricula in colleges to accommodate skills-based, job-oriented need-based certificates, diploma courses. ‘’It is time the universities adopted a helpful. Accommodative and flexible approach in granting permission to colleges to launch new programmes after proper quality scrutiny. A live academic give and take may be established with colleges by sharing faculty expertise, grant of Token Seed Money may be Summative evaluation and the consequent delays and glitches in the final results,’’ said NACC.
