Madurai: The University Grants Fee (UGC) will soon empower some autonomous colleges across the nation which will award their own degrees to their students instead of universities they are affiliated to.
To culminate this approach, the UGC Act is being amended by the fee.
“We have framed a set of guidelines to select colleges. Nearly 1,000 colleges will be elected by the UGC to give them power to award their own degrees,” said Xavier Alphonse, UGC member.
Colleges with minimum 15 years of autonomous status and with a excellent examination system would be chosen. Besides, the particular autonomous college must have social reputation and should have satisfied all the criteria fixed by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
According to UGC, another vital provision would be that the State regime should continue to extend funding support to chosen autonomous colleges.
The Union Human Resource Development Minister Mr. Arjun Singh has questioned UGC to prepare separate regulations for institutions run by people from linguistic/religious minorities with regard to administration, recruitment, selection of teachers and all issues connected to governance.
“Work on drafting rules is going on and we are taking the observations of Supreme Court and High Court also in suitcases correlated to minority institutions, particularly in the St. Stephen’s College case,” Dr. Alphonse added.