This story is from July 26, 2014

NAAC finally moves towards autonomy, to come out of UGC's shadow

After dilly-dallying for six months, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been pushed to start the process of autonomy.
NAAC finally moves towards autonomy, to come out of UGC's shadow
MUMBAI: After dilly-dallying for six months, the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been pushed to start the process of autonomy.
READ ALSO: NAAC to move out of regulator UGC's shadow
At the NAAC's 66th executive council meeting, it was decided that the country's accreditation body for higher education institutions would snap ties with the University Grants Commission (UGC), thus ending the commission's two-decade-long supremacy.

In the EC meeting that took place on Thursday, it was also decided that the HRD ministry will take the NAAC under its wing. Currently, the NAAC functions under the UGC, but the ministry had, in a letter, bluntly asked the accreditation body and the regulator to keep each other at "an arm's length".
Despite that, there was enormous internal resistance from within the NAAC.

The divorce will require the NAAC to draw up new byelaws, besides amending its memorandum of association. HRD ministry sources said that besides routine administrative changes, the NAAC, whose inspections have been the subject of intense scrutiny and debate with allegations of favours taken and given, has to be revamped and "sanitized".

"After the UGC made accreditation mandatory, the idea of making the NAAC an independent body has been stressed upon in several meetings," an HRD ministry official said. Across the world, such a separation is the norm. "Yet, despite several reminders, the ministry's suggestion was not being acted upon," he added.

Many in the HRD ministry blame the UGC for the NAAC's limited growth. Officials said the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), which grades technical courses, underwent a transformation "financially and functionally" after it was separated from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).
The process of making the NBA autonomous and independent of the AICTE was driven by the goal of making the NBA a member of the Washington Accord, which is seen as an international platform for governing quality in undergraduate engineering programmes. "Thus, keeping in view the existing requirements of a globally accepted quality regime for enhancing student mobility, it is requested to work out a copy of the draft MOA and rules to make the NAAC autonomous in relation to the UGC," the letter dispatched by the HRD ministry stated.
"The regulator and the assessor cannot be the same body; they must be independent," NAAC's former executive council chairman Goverdhan Mehta said. "How can assessment be carried out by a body of your own creation?"
He said that assessment and accreditation in the country were late starters, but now the NAAC was mature enough and had the requisite experience to function independently.
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