The Academic Bank of Credit referred to as ABC in short, is a virtual mechanism that will deal with the credits earned by students of Higher Education Institutes in India and which are recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
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About Academic Bank of Credit
It is a credit facility originally envisioned by the Government of India in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020. The scheme has the provisions of creating a digital infrastructure that will store the academic credits earned by the students of various higher education institutes within the country.
The ABC will be entrusted with the responsibilities such as opening, closing, and verifying the individual academic accounts of students. It’ll also be responsible to gather the academic credits earned by the students from their respective higher education institutions, verify the credits, store the credits, transfer or redeem such credits, and promote them as and when required among its stakeholders.
Students will have to manually open an account with the Academic Bank of Credit of India and abide by the standard operating procedures as communicated to them by the ABC along with a unique ID that identifies a student’s account with the ABC.
The bank will start functioning with over 290 top Indian higher education institutions participating in the academic session 2021-2022. Among these will have all institutes that are in the list of top 100 of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) and also all those institutes which are accredited “Grade A” by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC)
Note: To read more about National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), visit the attached link.
Features, and Functions of Academic Bank of Credit
- The scheme will include all kinds of courses offered by the Higher Education Institutes and which are recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC), be it a graduation course, postgraduate course, PhD courses, diploma courses, certificate courses, etc.
- It covers courses offered through any medium, be it regular classroom courses or open/distance learning courses or online courses.
- SWAYAM, NPTEL, V-Lab and such other schemes offering their courses are also eligible to avail the facilities provided by Academic Bank of Credit.
- In general the credits earned by students will carry a validity of 7 years unless otherwise specified for that particular course; and upon the end of the validity period these credits will expire.
- The ABC will not accept any kind of credit course document by the students but rather only from the higher education institution he/she is enrolled in. These institutes will be responsible to deposit these credits into the student’s ABC account regularly.
Significance of Academic Bank of Credit
- The credits stored in the individual accounts of the students will give them a much larger scope of freedom in terms of their academic/career choices.
- The students will be able to drop out of their institute from any year/semester and exchange the credits earned so far with a certificate/diploma if eligible. They will also be able to redeem the credits and rejoin the same institute or some other institute of his/her choice at the same time or some other time in future and continue from the year/semester his education is pending from.
- It will not let the time a student has spent for his higher education go waste if he/she decides to drop off the course/institute for any reason.
- The scheme will do away with the coercive system adopted by some institutes to keep the student enrolled in their courses against their will, with the motive of earning money.
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