Niti Aayog says that those centrally funded institutions that are performing well get more financial and operational autonomy. To the contrary, the higher education institutes functioning “not-so-well” will be constantly at the corner of the government’s eye.
“The government will keep a close watch on “not-so-better” higher educational institutions and if their ranking in terms of academic performance does not improve over a period of time, then the financial support to them will be reviewed,” Niti Aayog member V K Saraswat said.
“The focus of higher education is now on quality…The Aayog has said that the evaluation of educational institutes will be based on outcomes such as what level of quality an education institute has achieved, how many PhD scholars a particular institute has produced,” Saraswat said.
According to Saraswat, the government is planning to introduce a three-tier autonomy mechanism for educational institutes.
“Better performing educational institutes will get more operational autonomy and more financial support. Suppose if they want to open new research centres, then the government will provide financial support,” he said.
This step is to provide enough autonomy to the well-performing institutions to carry out high-level research.
“The not so better performing educational institutes will be watched out but will continue to get support,” Saraswat said, adding that those “ranked poor would remain under the government control and if they don’t improve after some time then financial support to them will be reviewed”.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had allocated Rs 37,435 crore in 2017-18 budget for scientific ministries.
Jaitley in his 2016-17 Budget speech had said that regulatory architecture will be provided to 10 public and 10 private institutions to emerge as world-class teaching and research bodies.