© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Internal systems can be accessed by employees who are “no longer its employees”, temporary “consultants” have been given powers rather than regular staffers; universities issued A+ grades despite “wrong claims” in Self Study Reports (SSRs) which are alloted to only certain empanelled Data Validation and Verification (DVV) firms.
These alleged irregularities in the functioning of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), which grades colleges and universities, could just be the “tip of the iceberg”, observed a committee set up by Bhushan Patwardhan who resigned as the council’s chairman on March 5 over the UGC “ignoring” the findings.
Sources told The Indian Express that the report by a panel led by J P Singh Joorel, who is is the Director of Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) which is involved in modernising university libraries, was prepared after the team of experts camped in the NAAC’s Bangalore campus between August 23 and 26 last year.
Apart from Joorel, the members were Director Inter-University Accelerator Centre Prof Avinash C Pandey, Former NIT Surathkal Director Prof Sandeep Sancheti and Prof Madhulika Kaushik of the Usha Martin University in Jharkhand.
Among the serious lapses flagged by the committee in its report, one relates to the allocation of higher educational institutions, which have applied for NAAC accreditation, to DVV partners, which are empanelled by the NAAC through a tendering process.
The committee, sources said, found that “allocation of SSRs to DVV partners is neither sequential, nor round robin/random”.
“There were variations in the number of HEIs allotted to different DVV partners during the year 2021. In one instance, 12 SSRs were allotted to one DVV partner while only two SSRs were allotted to the second DVV Partner on October 28, 2021,” sources said.
Under NAAC’s accreditation process, the first step involves an applicant institution submitting a self-study report (SSR) based on 137 quantitative and qualitative metrics covering seven broad areas. The data is subjected to validation by DVV partners, which is followed up by site visits by peer teams drawn up from a panel of over 4000 assessors.
The Joorel panel, which submitted its report last September, also flagged that the NAAC’s internal system has several super admin users (who enjoy full rights in terms of access and bringing changes) who are “no more employees” of the council. “There is no clarity on how users are created and are granted privileges and logs are maintained,” sources said.
Before resigning, Patwardhan had on February 26 written to UGC Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar expressing apprehension about the “possibility of vested interests, malpractices, and nexus among the persons concerned, offering thereby a green corridor by presumably manipulating ICT, DVV and PTV (peer team visit) processes leading to the awarding of questionable grades to some HEIs”.
In its report, the committee flagged 13 cases, where grades between A++ and A+ were issued, having “anomalies” “which may be tip of the iceberg”, the source quoted the report as having observed. In one such case, the committee found, one university was graded A+ despite “over 50% of metric values entered by it in its SSR found to be wrong”.
UGC Chairman Jagadesh Kumar and NAAC Director S C Sharma did not respond to requests for comments on the contents of the report.
On March 7, The Indian Express reported that nearly 70 per cent of experts from the pool of assessors did not appear to have received any opportunity to conduct site visits while some others had multiple such visits.
Responding to the report, the NAAC on March 7 issued a statement saying that the entire process of accreditation and assessment it carries out through teams of experts is “transparent” and cannot be “compromised”.
On the finding that the IT system of NAAC was “compromised”, with people without authority also getting to make allocations of assessors, the Council had stated that “super-admins comprising advisor ICT and system analyst have been created only to manage and supervise the overall operations of the system”.
