Public perception of the quality of higher education institutions (HEIs) in India is influenced significantly by the accreditation system run by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). The CBI arrest of seven NAAC officials earlier this year in a bribery-for-ratings case sullied trust in this system. It is against this backdrop that the recent removal of over a fifth of the body’s 5,300-plus assessors must be read — as necessary cleansing to revive trust.

Allegations of bad-faith assessments have been around for a long time, and a NAAC probe reported data discrepancies, protocol violations, and other irregularities on the part of some assessors. The impact of this is not hard to imagine -- hundreds of thousands of students hoodwinked over the years even as HEIs learned to play the system to their advantage. To that end, the recent purge, and a similar one done before the CBI arrests, could prove effective in curbing compromised ratings.

Public perception of the quality of higher education institutions (HEIs) in India is influenced significantly by the accreditation system run by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). The CBI arrest of seven NAAC officials earlier this year in a bribery-for-ratings case sullied trust in this system. It is against this backdrop that the recent removal of over a fifth of the body’s 5,300-plus assessors must be read — as necessary cleansing to revive trust.

Allegations of bad-faith assessments have been around for a long time, and a NAAC probe reported data discrepancies, protocol violations, and other irregularities on the part of some assessors. The impact of this is not hard to imagine -- hundreds of thousands of students hoodwinked over the years even as HEIs learned to play the system to their advantage. To that end, the recent purge, and a similar one done before the CBI arrests, could prove effective in curbing compromised ratings.

That said, NAAC will need to undertake significant reforms to regain trust. There is a clear need to implement the K Radhakrishnan committee recommendations post haste. Work on rolling out two key reforms — shifting to binary or basic accreditation system and maturity-based graded levels that tracks performance over the years — is underway and NAAC says these could be rolled out within a month. Beyond this, the assessment body must consider institutionalising sustained stakeholder feedback to make its system more responsive to the actual demand-base it needs to cater for — the country’s students. Removing dubious assessors won’t work if the structure allows more to come up; the need is for radical reforms.