NEW DELHI: The maiden Common Universities Entrance Test (CUET), touted as a single-window solution to cumbersome college admissions, had a bumpy start in 2022, but the year belonged to the new National Education Policy overhauling the country’s academic structure.
Major promotion of mother tongue, including teaching engineering and medicine, and soon legal education, in local languages, immense flexibility to students by providing them multiple entry and exit in courses and easing PhD rules are sweeping measures that will change the face of education in the coming years.
The year also saw India’s premier educational establishments – Indian Institutes of Technologies (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) – bettering their international rankings, paving the way for strengthening their global presence by opening up offshore campuses.
It will be two-way traffic as foreign universities open their campuses in India, making global standards in higher education affordable at home.
The coming year will focus on one of the major initiatives of the education ministry, the National Credit Framework (NCrF), for which Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan launched a public consultation on October 19.
The first-of-its-kind framework in India, NCrF, to be launched in 2023, aims to integrate academic education and skilling. It is a unified credit accumulation and transfer framework, which applies to school, higher and vocational education providing flexibility to students to pick their learning trajectories, as it allows for mid-way course correction or modifications according to their talents and interests.
On the anvil is also the Higher Education Commission of India, for which a committee was set up to merge the University Grants Commission (UGC), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE). Though the proposal first came in 2018, it is one of the significant transformations suggested under NEP 2020.
According to University Grants Commission Chairperson Prof M. Jagadesh Kumar, in 2022, the Commission introduced many initiatives and encouraged higher educational institutions (HEIs) to implement them effectively.
One such achievement was when several educational institutions registered for the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC), which paved the way for uploading students’ credentials on the ABC Portal.
ABC is a virtual/digital storehouse that contains information on the credits earned by individual students throughout their learning journey. It will enable students to open their accounts and give multiple options for entering and leaving colleges or universities.
“With the enabling provision of allowing students to pursue two academic programmes simultaneously, the UGC has created multiple formal and informal learning pathways. UGC’s Professor of Practice will pave the way to increase institution-industry collaborations,” Prof. Kumar told TNIE.
The revised Ph.D rules that will facilitate the direct entry of four-year UG students into Ph.D courses, doing away with the mandatory condition of publications and permitting research and teaching assistantships, is the other highlight.
The year also saw the announcement of twinning, joint or dual degrees with academic collaborations between Indian and foreign higher educational institutes.
However, one of the significant challenges this year was filling faculty vacancies – a whopping over 11,000 positions - in 45 Central Universities (6,180), IITs (4,502), and IIMs (493); but also in Kendriya Vidyalayas (14,000 teaching and non-teaching posts) and Navodaya Vidyalaya (4,227). The ministry said the process to fill up these positions has begun in a “mission mode.”
Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti (NVS) Commissioner Vinayak Garg told TNIE all vacancies of teaching and non-teaching staff are being filled in mission mode. Of the total of 4227 notified vacancies, 757 have been filled. “All the vaccines will be filled by April 2023,” he said.
So what more is in store for next year?
A better coordinated and glitch-free CUET, which the UGC chairman has stressed, was neither to make board exams irrelevant nor give a push to coaching culture so that both students and their parents don’t agonise in terms of travelling long distances, change of examination centres at the last minute and even technical glitches while taking the exam.
A significant reform on the card is the National Higher Education Qualification Framework, which will be instrumental in the development, classification, and recognition of qualifications to ease the integration of vocational education into higher education.
Another major initiative will be the National Digital University, which is likely to be established on the hub and spoke model, and would bring together various universities with no upper cap on the number of seats so that Class 12 pass students can access higher education.
The Four-Year Under-Graduate Programme (FYUP) to be adopted in all higher education institutions from 2023-24 academic session is yet another step that aims to develop student’s capabilities across a range of disciplines, including sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, languages, as well as professional, technical, and vocational subjects.