#Civil Rights
Target:
UNESCO
Region:
GLOBAL

How can we ensure private universities are held to high standards?

We can borrow the model from the corporate sector. Just as all companies are required by law to publish annual reports providing details of their assets, liabilities, profits and losses, the profiles of the board of directors and the management and various other financial information, every educational institution (whether public or private) should publish an annual report with details of the infrastructure and facilities available, profiles of the trustees and the administrators, the academic qualifications and experience of the staff, the courses offered, the number of students, the results of the examinations, the amount of funds available to the university and the sources of funding etc.

In addition, every educational institution must get itself rated by an independent rating agency like CRISIL, ICRA or CARE and publicly announce its rating to prospective students to enable the students to choose the institution they want to enroll in.

At one stroke, this will bring in transparency and ensure that every educational institution, whether public or private, is accountable not only to those students who are studying in the institution, but to prospective students and the public at large as well.

Public announcements of the financial and educational records of the institutions as well as their ratings by independent rating agencies will generate healthy competition between the various private institutions and will also put pressure on the Government funded institutions to work towards all-round improvement.

All private universities must conform to some basic infrastructure and quality norms, which have clearly been flouted by many of the private univerities in Chattisgarh, conforming to UGC norms would mean that the Centre (through the UGC) would continue to have control over all private universities and can decide if a private university is upto the 'mark' or not.

That the control of the UGC/AICTE and other such regulatory bodies over the certification of universities leads to corruption and harassment (to different extents in different cases) is a known fact and the continuation of that isn't good. But I don't have any working solution to propose at this point on how to do away with the UGC's control and yet enforce some basic infrastructure and quality norms.

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The Inefficient and unregulated private universities of India, especially at Madras petition to UNESCO was written by dr kalpana and is in the category Civil Rights at GoPetition.