The special committee consisting of 10 people recommended that over 1,000 assessors with more than one-fifth of its 5,300 assessor pool be removed by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). This is after a corruption scandal rocked the organisation early this year, with which Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairperson, NAAC Executive Committee, said the decision was made because of.
In February, seven members of the NAAC peer team, along with three office bearers of Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation (KLEF) in the Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh, were arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). According to them, the KLEF officials gave bribes to grab an A++ accreditation rating in an NAAC inspection on a bribery case.
Less than a month before the bribery incident, NAAC had already started cleaning its own house — removing close to 800 of its previous 6,100 assessors for things such as data discrepancies, unfavourable reactions, and protocol violations. The reduction of those assessors to 5,364 was the first step in that.
Seven of the assessors were arrested and within days after their release from detention, the NAAC debarred all of them from any future institutional evaluations. Interestingly, Sahasrabudhe said that all the accused assessors had never visited colleges together in the past 18 months, and no irregularities were found in the visits in which some of them had been individually.
This only led to a deeper probe of the controversy. The NAAC, in response to several complaints about inconsistent grading, relooked over and re-assessed over 400 institutions, including government colleges. However, these investigations revealed such suspicious patterns as unusually high first-time scores, sharp grade jumps and large differences between Data Validation and Verification (DVV) and Peer Team Visit (PTV) outcomes. This is also why over 50 per cent of the reassessed institutions had their grades changed downwards, thus implying that NAAC’s evaluation system had come under a major cleanup effort.
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