NAAC: What about accreditation of accreditors?
As the NAAC contemplated acting on the Radhakrishnan Committee’s report on reforming accreditation, it found itself embroiled in a graft scam.
As the NAAC contemplated acting on the Radhakrishnan Committee’s report on reforming accreditation, it found itself embroiled in a graft scam. The chancellor of a university and a few officials were arrested for allegedly bribing the experts for higher grades than the institution deserved. Some of the concerned peer-team members were also booked for allegedly skimming favours in cash and kind.
The NAAC has acted speedily and taken more than 800 experts off its panel. How did it identify them so fast? Why did it wait for the taint to become public if the suspects were already known?
The NAAC would now be under pressure to effect select recommendations of the Radhakrishnan Committee. Accreditation will now be a two-step process: A mandatory binary accreditation followed by a voluntary maturity-based grading. The assessment parameters might be drastically diluted to make a much larger number of institutions qualify for accreditation. Peer assessment will likely go digital, eliminating the need for physical visits.
These measures may not necessarily help the NAAC fulfil its primary obligation of promoting quality and enhancing excellence in higher education so long as autonomy and empowerment continue to elude the agency.
The agency’s foremost failing was the refusal of premier higher educational institutions, the Institutions of National Importance (INIs), to get themselves accredited by it for quality assurance. Even today, the IIMs,IITs, and similar institutions remain unaccredited.
Even if they did not intend to challenge the agency’s competence and credibility, their decision and its acceptance by the NAAC, as well as the University Grants Commission and the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development – now the Union Ministry of Education – signaled just that. The global higher education fraternity often quipped: How come the only national accrediting agency does not accredit the best higher education institutions in India?
