In north India, Chandigarh leads in percentage of accredited colleges: NAAC director

Chandigarh has the highest percentage of colleges that have received accreditation from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), said NAAC director Ganesan Kannabiran on Thursday.
Kannabiran was speaking at the “vice-chancellors’ conference” on National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 organised by Punjab governor UT administrator Gulab Chand Kataria at Raj Bhawan.
The two-day long conference, which will conclude on Friday, is on the theme of fostering educational excellence, language inclusion and institutional growth. V-C’s of all Punjab universities were present, along with Punjab education minister Harjot Singh Bains.
The session by Kannabiran was on the recent advances and procedures in NAAC accreditation. While discussing how reforms are being brought to the accreditation process, he shared data for the northern region, and 58% of the colleges in Chandigarh are accredited. Of the 26 total colleges, 15 are accredited. This is even higher than in Delhi, where 53% of colleges or 99 of 188 colleges are accredited.
The northern region comprises Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. For universities, Chandigarh is just behind Delhi, with two of its three universities having accreditation which is 67% as compared to 21 of 30 universities in Delhi which is 70%.
The NAAC director spoke about how a low accreditation percentage leads to unhealthy competition among higher education institutes (HEI) and unfair practices. He discussed how light but tight accreditation technology must be implemented to achieve a threshold level of quality for higher education at the national level and to consider the variability and heterogeneity of HEIs in the country. NAAC has set a target to cover 90% of HEIs in the next five years and will do this through binary accreditation and maturity-based graded levels.
University Grants Commission (UGC) joint secretary Avichal Raj Kapur discussed the features and implementation of the NEP. He shared data regarding the implementation of the academic bank of credits (ABC) for Punjab. A total of 5,03,056 automated permanent academic account registry (APAAR) IDs have been created for Punjab and 21% of them have been mapped under the ABC. Over 1.56 lakh registrations on the ABC portal have been made from Panjab University (PU).
UGC former chairman Ved Prakash spoke about the gross enrolment ratio of students in various states and different countries. He said the expenditure on education and research as a percentage of GDP in India is lower as compared to countries like the USA and UK.
A session was also held for the V-Cs to discuss NEP implementation. PU V-C Renu Vig spoke about the history of the university and its achievements in recent years.
In his inaugural address, Kataria commended Punjab’s education system, noting its high standards and progress compared to some other states. He emphasised that NEP 2020 offers a valuable framework to further enhance educational outcomes. Meanwhile, Bains stressed upon the need to focus on research and employment-based education with 100 percent placement targets.