Following online infrastructure of services under Digital India campaign, the Mahatma Gandhi University will use the services of National Academic Depository (NAD) — the online store house of academic awards — starting this year.
Recommended by the University Grants Commission under the Ministry of Human Resource Development, the NAD ensures all educational records of students — degrees, diplomas, mark sheets and evaluation reports — are stored in electronic form. If misplaced or damaged, students can retrieve certificates any time.
Once the certificates are fed into NAD, it will make them authentic and safe forever, says university’s Vice-Chancellor Khaja Altaf Hussain.
The facility, according to the staff, is in Hyderabad Central University and Osmania University, and MGU is the latest one to adopt it in the State. Prof. Hussain says NAD’s best feature is that it prevents forging and fraudulent practices by anyone, thereby assuring education quality.
NAD is free of cost for registration and maintenance services for institutions till September 2019, and for all students till they attain the age of 27. Officials say it also ensures privacy of data, and only after consent of the student each time, verification users like banks, employers and government agencies will be able to view specific information.