The K Radhakrishnan committee submitted its report to the government in May 2023. In this article, we discuss the K Radhakrishnan Committee, its members, its mandate and the report to the government. Committees and commissions are important topics for the IAS exam polity and governance segment of GS paper II.
K Radhakrishnan Committee
In November 2022, the Central government constituted a High-Level Committee, under the Chairmanship of K. Radhakrishnan.
- The committee was formed for strengthening the Assessment & Accreditation processes and preparing a road map for the National Accreditation Council envisioned in the National Education Policy, 2020.
Recommendations of the Dr K. Radhakrishnan Committee
- The committee has recommended that the IITs should be brought under the ambit of NAAC (National Accreditation Council).
- IITs have so far never been accredited by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which is the existing agency that grades India’s colleges and universities.
- At present IITs follow their internal systems for periodic peer evaluation and assessment of programmes.
- National Accreditation Council (NAAC):
- The committee has proposed that instead of having separate bodies for accrediting institutes and courses, one overarching agency be set up.
- The proposed National Accreditation Council (NAAC), envisaged by the NEP, should also subsume the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), which ranks higher education institutes.
- The educational system should transition to the proposed accreditation regime by December 2023.
- Binary Accreditation System:
- At present, NAAC follows an eight-point grading system under which institutes are rated A++, A+, A, B++, B+, B, C and D based on data submitted by institutes and their verification by expert teams during campus visits.
- The committee has suggested that under the new system, institutes be certified as “Accredited” or “Not Accredited (for those who are far below the standards for accreditation)”.
- A separate category of “Awaiting Accreditation” will cover institutes which are “close to the threshold level” or accreditation.
- The committee has also proposed that the entire accreditation process be made less dependent on inspections by teams of experts by adopting the mechanism of “crowdsourcing”.
- The aim is to get the inputs submitted by the institutes vetted by a “carefully chosen set of audience with diverse association with the concerned institutes”.
- This set of audience may include students (including PhD and postdoctoral scholars), faculty, staff, alumni, official visitors such as selection committee members, employers of the students, etc.
What is NAAC?
- It is an organisation that assesses and accredits higher education institutions (HEIs) in India.
- It is an autonomous body funded by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
- It is an outcome of the recommendations of the National Policy in Education (1986) which laid special emphasis on upholding the quality of higher education in India.
- Headquartered in Bangalore.
- The mandate of the NAAC as reflected in its vision statement is in making quality assurance an integral part of the functioning of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs).
- The NAAC functions through its General Council (GC) and Executive Committee (EC) comprising educational administrators, policymakers and senior academicians from the cross-section of the Indian higher education system.
- Read more about NAAC in the linked article.
K Radhakrishnan Committee:- Download PDF Here
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