The Paramarsh Scheme was introduced by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in the year 2019.
With the ever-increasing need for education, it is important to standardize it for all the institutions in order to impart the same level of knowledge.
This policy was introduced in order to improve the ranking of the Indian higher education institutions. It was introduced because the Indian institutions failed to meet the quality standards laid down by the National Assessment Accreditation Council (NAAC). It aims to improve the universal ranking of the institutions.
The NAAC was established in 1994 with the object to prioritize the quality of education provided in the Indian higher education institutions.
The mentor institution and the mentee institution should be a government, aided, private or a self-financing institution. The mentor institution should be NAAC accredited with an ‘A’ grade, having an overall score of 3.26 and above.
It is a University Grant Commission scheme for mentoring the NAAC institutions to promote and maintain the Quality Assurance in the higher education provided by the higher education institutions. The Human Resource Development mentioned that initially 71 universities and 391 colleges with NAAC scores of 3.26 and above would mentor five colleges each.
This scheme has aimed to improve the efficiency, the utilization of resources and overall development of the mentee institutions. These institutions will have a better exposure and the best adaption practices.
The mentee institutions will learn from the most well performing institutions which will boost and improve their academic performance. The scheme will also lead to enhance the quality of research, the teaching and the learning methodologies of the mentee institution. The scheme would also contribute to sharing of knowledge, faculty development and research collaboration.
The concept used in this scheme is the “Hub & Spoke” model, wherein the mentor institution is called as the “Hub”, which is centralized and is responsible to train the mentee institution through the secondary branches called the “Spoke” i.e., through the services provided to the mentee institution for their self-improvement.
The scheme aims to target 1000 Higher Education Institutions for mentoring with particular focus on improving the quality and maintaining the same as laid down under the UGC Quality Mandate.
As a part of the scheme, the mentor institutions can get financial assistance from the UGC up to Rs. 30 lakhs and they can hire experts, who can be paid a fellowship amount of Rs. 31,000 per month. Any institute that is recognized under section 2(f) and 12B of the University Grant Commission Act, 1956 would be eligible to obtain grants for the above-mentioned purpose of mentoring. Since these grants are used for mentoring and not for creation of infrastructure for the institution, the private institutions can also be granted the funds for their teacher-centric programs/schemes.
The NAAC assesses the Higher Education Institutions on the basis of seven parameters which include teaching-learning and evaluation, infrastructure and learning resources, research, innovation and extension, curricular aspects, governance, leadership and management, student support and progression and institutional values and best practices.
The proposals for mentoring would be invited from leading institutes that would be interested to mentor the colleges.
The scheme would also benefit the mentee institutions to obtain NAAC accreditation.
A few colleges/mentor institutions under the Paramarsh Scheme are Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU), Jagarlamudi Kuppuswamy Choudary College, P.B. Siddhartha College of Arts & Science, Andhra Loyola College, Godavari Institute of Engineering & Technology, Prasad V. Potluri Siddhartha Institute of Technology, etc.
As of September 2019, UGC approved 167 mentor institutions and 800 mentee institutions. Once the proposals that are made by the colleges have been accepted, the colleges can start mentoring within a period of one month.
The intention to launch this scheme was to give a quality assurance about the education provided by the Higher Education Institutions. With the ever-increasing demand for quality education it was a necessary step to be taken.
With this scheme, not only the mentor and mentee institutions would benefit, but also provide quality education to the 3.6 crore or more students who at present are enrolling for the Higher Secondary courses.
It is very important that every student who has enrolled gets the same quality of education and that too good quality. No one should be deprived from good education only because they have been enrolled in a college or institution that is not up to the mark.
Every student is entitled to quality education. The scheme focuses on assuring quality education which would give an equal opportunity to all those students from different institutions to stand on the same platform and succeed.
The mentor institutions selected are very well in everything which serves as a huge advantage for the mentee institutions as they can look up to them. The Scheme is an advantage in a number of ways as mentioned above. It will help a lot of students in a lot of different ways.
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