Indian higher education system is transforming rapidly in 2024 through NEP 2020: UGC

The recommendations of a committee established by the Ministry of Education include binary accreditation and one maturity-based graded accreditation. Read here for more details.

Ministry of Education, Government of India constituted an overarching committee with Dr. K. Radhakrishnan, Former Chairman of ISRO and Chairperson, Standing Committee of IIT Council as Chairman in November 2022 to propose transformative reforms for strengthening Assessment and Accreditation of higher education institutions in India.

A set of transformative reforms have been proposed by the Committee to strengthen the periodic approval, assessment & accreditation, and ranking of ‘All HEIs’ of India. 

The following are the salient features of the recommendations:

• Binary Accreditation (Either accredited or not accredited) rather than grades with an aim to encourage all the institutions to get on-boarded in the accreditation process thereby creating a quality culture in the higher education system. The binary accreditation is also in line with the
• best practices followed from many leading countries in the world.
• Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation (Level 1 to 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. The leveled accreditation shall enable Indian institutions to significantly improve their quality and position themselves among global top institutions.
• The metrics for both Binary and Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation shall focus on Processes, Outcomes and Impact across different attributes of HEIs (instead of mere input-centric). 
• One Nation One Data Platform has been proposed as part of the reform to ensure integrity and transparency in handing institutional data. The new platform shall capture superset of data from HEIs for the varied purposes (of approval, accreditation, ranking) with an in-built design for collateral cross-checking to check authenticity of data. In addition, to improve the validity and reliability of the data “Stakeholder validation” has been proposed to effectively integrate stakeholders as part of the accreditation and ranking process.
• The system shall be based on Trust and Data Driven with minimal visits to an institution for verification; however, carrying heavy penalties on giving wrong submissions. In addition, there will be provision for customized ranking based on stakeholders such as industry, funding agencies, students etc.

The Executive Committee of NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council) in its 104th meeting held on Jan 27, 2024 decided the following:

• The recommended reforms shall be implemented in two stages. In the first stage, the Binary accreditation will be implemented in the next four months and no new applications will be accepted as per the present methodology thereafter. Institutions that have already applied and are applying in the next four months shall have the option to either go by the present process or by the new methodology of binary accreditation. The Maturity based Graded levels will be implemented by December 2024.
• The methodologies and formats are being redesigned based on recommendations of Dr. Radhakrishnan committee report and the same shall also be reflected in the data collection andvvalidation process using One Nation One Data Platform making the system friendly, easy and smooth.

Read more: 

• NMC issues clarifications on implementation of AEBAS
• INI SS January 2024 Session: AIIMS releases schedule of Open Round for Institute Allocation