The University Grants Commission (UGC) has informed that so far, 408 universities and 8,713 colleges have been accredited by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which conducts assessment and accreditation of higher educational institutions (HEIs) to understand the quality status of the institution, the Centre told the Lok Sabha Monday, July 25.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, in a written reply, said that the UGC has informed that to bring the HEIs under the ambit of accreditation, NAAC has engaged in handholding activities like conducting seminars, webinars and awareness programmes for HEIs and bilingual video tutorials to help them to understand the accreditation process simply and lucidly.
He said that the department-related parliamentary standing committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports has observed that "at present, barely 20 per cent of the approximately 50,000 educational institutions go for formal accreditation."
The minister said the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 envisions that accreditation of institutions will be based primarily on basic norms, public self-disclosure, good governance and outcomes. It will be carried out by an independent ecosystem of accrediting institutions supervised and overseen by a 'meta-accrediting body' called the National Accreditation Council (NAC). NEP further envisions that in the long run, accreditation will become a binary process, as per the extant global practice, he said.
