HRD ministry to give distance education a leg-up

To give a fillip to distance education in India, the HRD has decided on a new mechanism which will enable faster and transparent clearance to new distance education institutes and courses. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Aug 23, 2011, 24:34:14 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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To give a fillip to distance education in India, the HRD has decided on a new mechanism which will enable faster and transparent clearance to new distance education institutes and courses.

The ministry last week decided that all distance education proposals will be discussed once every month by a joint committee of the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), the three higher education regulatory bodies.

Proposals regarding distance education are cleared by Distance Education Council (DEC) under IGNOU but the UGC and AICTE have been opposing several decisions citing regulatory flaws. No distance education institute or course is allowed without a mandatory no-objection certificate from UGC and AICTE but still approvals have been given.

“The distance education council used to seek post facto clearance which we had opposed,” said UGC chairperson Ved Prakash. It meant a customary three to four months to decide on a specific proposal resulting in huge delays.

To end the continuous wrangling between different higher education regulatory bodies and speed up the approval process, HRD minister Kapil Sibal held discussions with chiefs of these regulatory bodies last week and decided to constitute a joint committee to be convened by a ministry official.

“The onus of fostering distance education will now be ministry’s responsibility,” a HRD ministry official said. But, the final decision would still remain with the regulatory bodies. “We have provided a mechanism for faster disposal of disputes,” the official explained.

The decision was fall-out of the concern raised by educationists regarding anticipated failure of existing universities and colleges to meet the increase in demand for higher education in the coming years. There are just 70 approved institutions to provide distance education as against the requirement of over 200. “Distance education is a viable alternative but we have to provide enough quality institutions to attract students,” the official said.

According to Ved Prakash, the new committee will consider all proposals and the decision will be taken there and then. Looking into quality of the courses provided is another aspect the committee will look into. The IGNOU will act as secretariat of the committee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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