The Government is working on a strategy for accreditation of more institutions to ensure benchmark of quality. K Sanjay Murthy, Secretary, Department of Higher Education, said this while speaking at the FICCI Higher Education in New Delhi on Nov 30. Informing that we have now 6-7 state governments committed towards accrediting these institutions in a fixed time frame, he said this accreditation drive is pivotal to establishing a certain standard of quality, ensuring that industry leaders can confidently select candidates from these institutions. He spoke about a strategic initiative to involve industry professionals in mentoring faculty members. “We are coming out with a strategy to see that we have industry professionals mentoring certain faculty on designing, thinking and entrepreneurship so that the entire start-up ecosystem,” he added.
Speaking on the New Education Policy (NEP) 2020, Mr Murthy added, “The NEP 2020 has liberated many academic institutions to look beyond what they were doing in the past and discover new avenues for providing better education to the students of our country.” On the new technology platforms rolled out by the government, secretary stated that ‘Samarth’ is being launched in many of the institutions and we will ensure that we cover at least 10,000 institutions in next 1.5 years.
Highlighting the mentioning of these technological platforms in the G20 Declaration he emphasized that Samarth, Swayam and Diksha (at school level) find a key mention as digital public infrastructure in the New Delhi Leaders Declaration. “We feel that these can be leveraged further for the benefit of the countries in the global south,” he stated.