Less policing for higher education centres from 2012

Regulators UGC, AICTE to trust institutes, but will impose heavy penalty for misinformation.

Updated on: Dec 22, 2011, 24:26:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Higher education will soon move from inspector raj to self-regulation with heavy penalty for telling a lie.

The two higher education regulators - All India Council for Technical Education and University Grants Commission --- will be moving from the regime of conducting inspections to grant approvals to new courses or for up-gradation of facilities to self-disclosure linked with national accreditation.

"We have provided the self-disclosure statements of over 10,000 institutions on our portal from next year for people to find out what the institutions are claiming is correct or not," said AICTE chairman SS Mantha.

It would be the council's first major step moving towards the new approval process.

Mantha said the council will trust the institutions for what they say. "Inspection will be conducted only on basis of a complaint," he said.

The University Grants Commission also aims to move towards a more transparency approval process and fund disbursal mechanism based on accreditation of the institution.

Both the regulators in past have received flak for imposing an inspector raj in the approval process resulting in allegations of corruption. The AICTE, in particular, was in the spot but with online system the instances of alleged corruption have come down.

"Inspection and approval regimes promote corruption and sloth. We need to move away this paradigm to authentication and automatic approvals," said a working group report prepared by the HRD ministry for the 12th five year plan.

The reforms in the approval process have been pending for long but now the government has decided to act as the basic ground work has been done. Data of most of the institutions are now available online with the regulatory bodies.

The ministry also wants to move from demand based grants to institutions of higher education to entitlement based with measurable outcome.

"Central funds cannot be right of an institution," a senior government official said.

"The institutions should compete for the Central government funds".

The UGC administers over 75 schemes of funding to Central and State Universities.

"The process of approval and sanction is not only time consuming, it also suffers from opaqueness and prolixity. Several schemes are delayed and never achieve intended results," the ministry document for the 12th plan had said, while urging for changing in fund disbursal system.

Under the new regime, the Central Universities will get up to 100% of their entitlement and the state universities not more than 75%. There will be financial incentive for institutions to set up campuses in educationally backward regions.

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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