Goa team visits K’taka, AP to study implementation of NEP

Panaji: As Goa prepares for implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, an eight-member team from the state visited Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh recently to study the NEP’s implementation there. Members of the directorate of higher education and Goa state higher education council were part of the team.
Professor Niyan Marchon of the state council said that the Goa team interacted with members of the Karnataka and the Andhra Pradesh state higher education councils.
One notable feature in Andhra Pradesh found by the Goa team was a portal developed for industry-internships by students, he said.
“Ten months of internships have been made a mandatory part of the undergraduate degree programme there. Currently, the Andhra Pradesh council is providing internships to about 3.7 lakh students. In order to generate such a large number of internships, the government of Andhra Pradesh has brought onboard all government departments, several industries, including Microsoft,” said Marchon.
“Karnataka has a state scholarship portal, where all scholarship-eligible students are automatically listed for appropriate scholarships Scholarship sponsoring departments then approve and disburse the amount directly to the students through direct benefit transfer. Annually, about 18 lakh students benefit through this portal where approximately Rs 18,000 crore is disbursed,” said Marchon.
In Karnataka, successful implementation of entitlement-based scholarship was found to have been possible because of availability of students’ data in digital form. Therefore, the Goa team decided to recommend a similar project to gather students’ data in Goa.
“In both Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the state higher education councils are playing a major role in implementation of NEP 2020. The policy is being implemented for all higher education institutes, including universities, independent of whether the institutes are government, government-aided or private,” said Marchon.
In addition to visiting state higher education councils, the Goa team visited NAAC headquarters in Bengaluru, to clarify several issues that many institutes in Goa face during NAAC accreditation process.
As part of NEP implementation, all higher education institutes in Goa are being asked to get NAAC accredited.
A NAAC team has also been invited to Goa to track all higher education institutes from Goa who are applying for the first time and a two-day training session is likely to be held for these institutes this month.