Opinion The Express View | NAAC’s top official’s resignation shines a light on flaws in the system to grade colleges, universities

All is not well with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), the UGC-affiliated autonomous body that grades colleges and universities in the country. On Sunday, its executive committee chairperson, Bhushan Patwardhan, resigned to “safeguard the sanctity” of the post to which he was appointed a little over a year earlier. Patwardhan had been flagging irregularities in the Bengaluru-based agency’s functioning in the days leading to his resignation. In a letter to UGC Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar on February 26, Patwardhan suggested that “vested interests and malpractices” were instrumental in some educational institutions obtaining “questionable grades”. A panel constituted by Patwardhan to review the Council’s working, last year, had raised similar concerns. Its report, submitted to the UGC in September 2022, pointed out that “nearly 70 per cent of experts from the pool of assessors did not appear to have received any opportunity to conduct site visits while some others have had multiple such visits”. A thorough investigation was required to remove the panel’s misgivings about “conflict of interest” in the assessment process. But the higher education regulator did not act on this report.

The NAAC relies heavily on self-assessment by applicant institutions. An applicant institution submits a self-evaluation report, which is then validated by NAAC expert teams, followed by peer team visits to the institutions. The last step has sparked controversy in the past. In September last year, this newspaper reported that the accreditation agency had withheld the grading of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda after receiving a tip-off that its peer review team had been bribed. The NAAC dismissed the allegations and released MS University’s scores. The controversy had surfaced at a time when the Council was holding internal conversations on the peer review system. A White Paper published by the agency on July 13, 2022, noted that, “The process of peer team visits adds substantial effort on the part of both NAAC and the higher educational institutions (HEI)”.

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Less than half of the country’s public universities and a little more than a fourth of the colleges were NAAC accredited, as of January 30. It’s evident that a large number of colleges and universities see the accreditation process as a burden. This is not unexpected in a country with a well-documented resource crunch in the majority of its HEIs. There surely is a case for the peer-review process “to be facilitatory” as suggested by the NAAC’s White Paper. The agency has also initiated conversations on other possibilities “to help the colleges improve the quality of education”. But these will remain mere suggestions unless the UGC lends an ear to its autonomous body.