Students to get unique numbers

UGC to track students with unique numbers

Published on: Jun 11, 2006, 02:03:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Remembering college roll numbers may become a thing of the past. You will get a unique enrolment number for your entire higher education career, irrespective of how many times you have migrated from one college, institution or university to another or from one stream to the other.

The number will be your identity for your entire academic stream.

"Details of your entire academic career will be available with the unique enrolment number at a click of the mouse," an official said. From admission fee to class attendance to marks scored at different levels to participation in extra curricular activities or sports, all will be found there.

It will have your entire academic history recorded from when you joined college in the first year. All that will be available if the scheme framed by the University Grants Commission is implemented in totality.

The UGC thought of providing each student with a unique enrolment number, as it wanted to create a 'national graduate student repository', a data bank of all the students in higher education in the country. "This would be possible only if each student in the country has a unique enrolment number," an official said.

The Commission constituted an expert committee under Dr V.C. Kulandaiswamy, former Vice-Chancellor of Mudurai Kamraj University, to suggest ways to have a system for a unique enrolment number. The report said, the repository will help UGC monitor the quality of higher education in India in a much better way and will make the entire system more transparent. "It will not only make migration easier for students, it will also put a check on admissions by way of fake degrees and mark-sheets," an official said.

The committee report, which was recently submitted to the commission, has been accepted. "We are now working on the scheme to implement the recommendations of the committee," an official said.

As a follow-up step, the commission has invited proposals from education institutions willing to undertake projects on national graduate student repository. "Some proposals are being considered," an official said, informing that software will be prepared for registration of students and generation of the unique enrolment number.

The task is enormous, officials admit. There are about 97 lakh students enrolled in higher education institutions in the country and many of them are in private institutions.

"It can be started with students joining the higher education stream," an official said. Even if the procedure is a difficult one, one can fairly expect a unique enrolment number system from academic year 2007-08.

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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