The government plans to overhaul the accreditation system for higher educational institutes by the end of the year, replacing the current practice of assigning a score and corresponding grade with a binary system, where institutions will be declared either accredited or unaccredited without specific scores or grades.

The National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), the Union government’s primary body for assessing and accrediting higher education institutions, announced on Saturday that the proposed reforms in the current accreditation system, put forth by the committee headed by former ISRO chairman Dr. K Radhakrishnan, have been accepted by the Education Ministry on January 16.

In light of this development, the NAAC’s Executive Committee has decided to introduce “binary accreditation” and “maturity-based graded levels” by the end of 2024.

Under the proposed binary accreditation system, higher educational institutions will be given either an “Accredited” tag or a “Not Accredited” one.

The Not Accredited will be divided into two categories – “Awaiting Accreditation” for those institutes that nearly meet the requirements but need improvement, and “Not Accredited” for the ones that are far below the standards for accreditation. In other words, accredited institutions will be the ones that have met certain standards.

At present, the NAAC assesses institutions and awards grades based on scores. If a higher education institution gets a score between 3.51 and 4, it gets an A++ grade. A score between 3.26 and 3.50 gets an A+ grade, and a score between 3.01 and 3.25 gets an A grade. There are eight grades in total, including C for scores between 1.51 and 2, which means basic accreditation, and D for scores below 1.51, indicating unaccredited status.

Another reform that NAAC announced on Saturday was the implementation of the “Maturity-Based Graded Accreditation”, in addition to the binary system. The former is for higher education institutions that have secured the “accredited” tag under the binary system and is for them to graduate “level one” to “level five”.

From level-one – an accredited institute – the plan is to incentivise improvement up to level-4 where an institution will become an “Institution of National Excellence”, and then further move to level-5 to get the tag of “Institution of Global Excellence for Multi-Disciplinary Research and Education”.

“The leveled accreditation shall enable Indian institutions to significantly improve their quality and position themselves among global top institutions,” a NAAC statement said.

There are two phases to the intended implementation of the Radhakrishnan Committee’s recommendations. First, the binary accreditation will be put in place over the course of the next four months, after which no more applications will be accepted using the current process.

Institutions that have applied already or plan to apply within the next four months will be able to choose between using the current approach and the new binary accreditation system. The maturity-based graded levels and other reforms will be implemented by December 2024, the official statement said.

To ensure integrity and transparency of handling the data collected from institutes, the ministry has planned to collect and display data on a public platform — One Nation, One Data platform.

This new platform will collect a “superset of data” from universities for a variety of purposes such as permission, accreditation, rating over time, and grade institutions based on this information.

At present, institutes are required to submit a large amount of paper-work that includes this data set to apply for accreditation.

To ensure credibility of data, under the new system, the platform will also have a built-in mechanism to cross-check the data’s veracity. This will replace the existing manual of assessment and accreditation where experts are responsible to visit campus and verify the data submitted by a university. The digitally driven mechanism will also minimise subjectivity and enhance transparency and credibility, as suggested by the committee.

Though the Radhakrishnan Committee had also recommended that the IITs are brought under a unified accreditation process, it’s not clear if they will be mandated to participate once NAAC rolls out the binary accreditation. Currently, IITs follow their internal systems for periodic evaluation and assessment of their programmes.