Bangalore, May 02: Union Minister for Human Resources Development, Kapil Sibal, said four bills related to education would be tabled in the parliament on Monday.
He was speaking after opening the new campus of National Assessment and Accreditation Council on Saturday.
The four bills are: Foreign Education Providers Bill; Prohibition of Unfair Practices in Technical, Medical Educational Institutions and Universities Bill; Educational Tribunals Bill; National Accreditation Regulatory Authority for Higher Educational Institutions Bill.
The first Bill will pave way for setting up branches of foreign varsities in India.
The second Bill recommends penalty for malpractices like charging capitation fees, demanding donations, incompetent teaching faculty, withholding students’ certificates and misleading ads.
The Educational Tribunals Bill will facilitate setting up tribunals at the national, state and regional levels to settle disputes related to educational institutions at various levels. The last Bill proposes to set up regulatory bodies to monitor and conduct accreditation of higher education institutes in a transparent manner.
He said accreditation and assessment was essential to set a benchmark, improve the quality of education and to enhance our educational standards to the international level. He said having campuses of foreign varsities in India would enable us to face global competition.
He said the world would turn to India in future for services, provided we upgraded our services and skills. By 2050, Germany’s population would have come down from 80 million now to 60 million, with majority aged 60 plus. He said most European countries and Canada would be facing severe shortage of manpower.
He said the world would have to turn to India for services and China for production .
He said because of quality and quantity of manpower in India, it was cheaper for foreign companies to start their businesses here. “At present, only 12.4 per cent of our population is going to varsities. This ratio should increase to 30 per cent,” Sibal said. “For that, we need 800 new varsities and more than 20,000 colleges.” On the sidelines of the function, he said the Atomic Energy Council already had the guidelines for handling radioactive substance. Now, we have to make guidelines for disposing bio-medical waste, chemicals, and other harmful substances in colleges.
UGC will provide the technical assistance for that.
——Agencies