NAAC's processes red-flagged by review panel after executive committee chairperson's resignation

The former NAAC executive committee chairperson recently resigned in order to preserve 'the sanctity of the post'

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) has been mired in controversy since a report was submitted by a panel to the University Grants Commission regarding its functioning, an Indian Express report revealed.

Bhushan Patwardhan, the former executive committee chairperson of NAAC who recently resigned in order to preserve "the sanctity of the post", had flagged the issue that the UGC was not taking any steps despite receiving the panel’s report that suggested that the process of choosing experts to review applications for NAAC accreditation were “neither random nor sequential”.

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In his letter, Patwardhan had said, “Based on my experience, various complaints from the stakeholders, and review committee reports, I had expressed my apprehensions earlier about the possibility of vested interests, malpractices, and nexus among the persons concerned, offering thereby a green corridor by presumably manipulating…processes leading to the awarding of questionable grades to some HEIs. Mainly due to this, I had also suggested the need for an independent inquiry by appropriate high-level national agencies.”

The report has brought to light that a number of experts (70 per cent) were not given opportunities to visit the institutions whose applications they were expected to review and rate.

The publication has also quoted a NAAC official as saying that around 30 per cent of the 4,000 experts who are members of peer groups are actually involved in the process of accreditation, and this reveals the “extent of rot” because of “allotment through manual interventions without valid reasons”.

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The report, according to sources the publication spoke to, has also highlighted that there are some “super admins” who have complete access to the NAAC’s internal functionings and they are the ones who also had the rights to deploy experts as they saw fit.

Another notable factor that the panel pointed out is the “non-maintenance of logs which may have adverse fall outs”.

The 2020-21 All India Survey on Higher Education Report reveals that from 43,796 colleges and 1,113 universities in the country, the NAAC had accredited only 9,062 colleges and 418 universities.

The process for NAAC accreditation involves an applying institution sending a self-study report (SSR) with the required metrics. This data is then verified by a body of experts who can then also visit the site as per requirement.