Dr Paliwal, NBA Member-Sec on B-School accreditation

AICTE set up National Board of Accreditation in   1994 for fostering improvement in quality of technical and management education. NBA is currently in the midst of revamping its accreditation processes. In a tête-à-tête with Nitin Jindal, NBA’s Member-Secretary Dr. D.K. Paliwal discusses the new accreditation policy and other issues

Q. What is the focus of the revamped accreditation policy?
A. NBA's motto is not only to accredit the institute or the programme, but also to facilitate the improvement of the quality of education in the country. Our domain is professional education, management, engineering and pharmacy. During the past few years there has been a vast expansion of educational institutions and which is a desirable development. But such rapid pace of expansion sometimes results in quantity and quality not going hand-in-hand. So our objective is to facilitate the quality of the institutions. The accreditation process of NBA is binary as is the case with the rest of the international accreditation bodies. So even when we hope to assist institutions in improving quality, only those that reach a particular level would be accredited. Either you have it or you don’t have it.

Q. How is NBA different from National Assessment and Accreditation Council or NAAC, established by the UGC?
A. NAAC confines itself to institutional accreditation. Most of their parameters of accreditation are input -based: faculty, governance process, finances, governing body, etc., though they do pay attention to the output. Our focus remains largely on the parameters that communicate the strength and weaknesses of a programme.

Q. As far as parameters are concerned, apart from being programme-centric or institution-centric, is there any other difference between NBA and NAAC?
A. Until very recently even NBA processes were focussed more on inputs. Our parameters were very close to the ones being followed by NAAC. Though not similar, we both were focussed on the qualitative aspect on the input side. But the revamped NBA accreditation process has shifted focus substantially. I cannot comment right now in detail about the parameters. I can certainly say that we give more emphasis to the programme objective, programme outcomes, relevance, processes, pedagogy, and teaching pattern.

Q. Has the accreditation manual been finalised?
A. The document has been finalised. We are in the process of editing the manual to make it ready for placing before our General Council which will consider adopting it. 

Q. Out of 3,000 to 3,500 B-schools that are there in the country, approximately what number is accredited by NBA?
A. I don’t remember the data right now but I don’t think many programmes are accredited.

Q. Does NBA have the bandwidth to let every institute that want to go in for the accreditation go through this process?
A. As on date we cannot handle all the 3500 institutions, but we are developing our capacity using information and communication technology. We are in the process of developing our database and use technology in the application process. Hopefully, we will have made a small beginning by January, 2012. By the last or third quarter of the next year we will have ramped up our capacity to accredit. But it is a time consuming process.

Q. Is the accreditation manual ready for other technical programmes? 
A. We started the process from undergraduate engineering programmes. We have completed the work for changing our processes with respect to postgraduate programmes, Pharmacy, Diploma-level Engineering programmes and very soon the manuals for Architecture, MCA, Hotel Management and Catering Technology will be ready.

Q. Will you accredit distance learning technical education programmes?
A. We have been monitoring vast expansion in distance education and evolving processes to provide accreditation services to distance learning programmes. However, we have limited ourselves to only MBA and MCA. Even the regulatory authorities like AICTE and the HRD ministry do not accept that engineering and medical education can be imparted through distance mode. We also feel that it is difficult as there are a lot of practical components in such programmes.

Distance mode in professional education can be very useful in orienting or re-training someone who is already in the industry. You are engaged in a profession and, say, over the last five years a lot of changes have occurred. So, if you want to learn and master these new techniques or concepts then distance education might be helpful. But, if you want that your first degree is acquired through distance mode then I am not comfortable.

Q.Is there an effort to benchmark globally?
A. In fact, we have already developed a model based upon the past practises being followed by international accreditation bodies like EQUIS and AACSB. We are organising the first world summit of accreditation in the coming months. The objective of organising this summit is that we want our presence on the global platform. We want to learn from the old accreditation agencies. What parameters they are following, what criteria they are following, what attributes they are expecting for granting accreditation.    

Q. Is the industry participating in the process?
A. We are giving due importance to the participation of the industries. We not only talk of the quality of education, but also of the relevance of the programme. The quality of education may be very good, but the programme may not be relevant to the profession. Ultimately you are sending out the graduates for the industry; so you should match industry’s expectations. We want more and more participation from the industry and to learn from them about their expectations.  This is the best way - to have equal focus on value and quality.

Q. What are your thoughts on the ranking business, especially that of B-Schools.
A. First of all, I would like to make the point that we cannot confuse the two things: ranking and accreditation. Ideally, ranking should have been attempted only within the accredited institutions as well as amongst those that are so well established and have achieved a certain level of excellence that it is not very important for them to be accredited.

If an institution is not even accredited, then logic says it does not deserve any ranking. But, say, 50 institutions are accredited. There would still be questions as to which one of them is the best. That is the point at which ranking becomes relevant. All of them are accredited, but in deciding the pecking order ranking plays an important role. So, I think it is very important for
the stake-holders to be involved in the process of ranking.