Close on the heels of its decision to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in the country, the government on Friday cleared a proposal to set up a national accreditation agency for higher educational institutions and set up multi-layered education tribunals. It has also cleared a proposal for empowering the Centre to take punitive action against private educational institutes that charge capitation fee.
The Bills for this purpose will be introduced in Parliament, most likely in the ongoing Budget session. Currently, getting an accreditation is optional for the educational institutes. The government now proposes to make accreditation mandatory.
The proposed legislation on tribunals aims to create a grievance redressal mechanism exclusively for disputes arising in the education sector. It recommends a three-tier tribunal system — at district, state and national levels- to deal with all disputes between students and institutions, teachers and institutions. The national-level tribunal will comprise members from judicial, academic and administrative services. It will decide on disputes arising among the higher education institutes and even regulatory bodies.According to sources, the thought behind this move is to build a streamlined system to exclusively handle education-related disputes instead of taking them to civil courts. This is expected to expedite dispute resolution.
These two Bills along with another one to check malpractices in educational institutes is central to HRD minister Kapil Sibal’s higher education reform agenda. The Bills had to pass the screening test of a Group of Ministers (GoM) headed by Sharad Pawar before they went to the Cabinet for clearance. Decks are now clear for these Apart from cracking down institutes charging capitation fee, the Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill also aims curbing various unfair practices such as over-charging on prospectus and making false claims in advertisements and brochures.
The Centre will be able to impose penalties and fines against erring institutes as per the proposed legislation’s provisions. Malpractices could attract a fine of Rs 50 lakh and imprisonment for three years. Criminal complaints could attract fines in the range of Rs 50,000 to Rs 3 lakh and imprisonment of one month to a year. The Bills on mandatory accreditation and penalty are expected to curb the mushrooming of ‘fake universities’.