NAAC: Accreditation, assessment process is transparent, can’t be compromised

The NAAC claimed that out of the total pool of 4,686 active assessors, "3075 assessors have accepted the peer team visit invitations, which is roughly around 67% of the database".

On the finding that the IT system of NAAC was “compromised”, with people without authority also getting to make allocations of assessors, the Council stated that "super-admins comprising advisor ICT and system analyst have been created only to manage and supervise the overall operations of the system”.

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

Two days after Bhushan Patwardhan quit as chairman of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), alleging that the Council was issuing “questionable grades” to higher education institutions, the agency on Tuesday said that the entire process of accreditation and assessment it carries out through teams of experts is “transparent” and “cannot be compromised”.

In a statement, NAAC director S C Sharma sought to counter the red flags raised by a committee commissioned by Patwardhan to examine the functioning of NAAC, and said that the processes within the Council are “continuously being improved”.

On Monday, The Indian Express reported on the findings of the committee, which was headed by J P Singh Joreel, director of Information and Library Network, which is also a UGC centre.

The NAAC claimed that out of the total pool of 4,686 active assessors, “3075 assessors have accepted the peer team visit invitations, which is roughly around 67% of the database”. The Joreel committee said that nearly 70% of experts from the pool of around 4,000 assessors have not received any opportunity to make site visits, while some have visited multiple times.

On the finding that the IT system of NAAC was “compromised”, with people without authority also getting to make allocations of assessors, the Council stated that “super-admins comprising advisor ICT and system analyst have been created only to manage and supervise the overall operations of the system”.

“As per the mandate of NAAC, the entire process of accreditation and assessment is robust, transparent, ICT-driven and automated. The system cannot be compromised because the whole process is decentralised, transparent and accessible to the stakeholders through a user friendly portal…” it stated.