The Supreme Court of India has dealt a serious blow to deemed universities granting degrees that are delivered by distance or correspondence learning without first obtaining mandatory permission from the statutory bodies. The court suspended the engineering degrees awarded to students on distance courses between 2001 and 2005 by three deemed universities; and annulled degrees granted by those institutions after 2005. It also issued a blanket restraint on all deemed universities obliging them not to carry on any course from the academic year 2018-19 “unless and until specific permissions are granted by the concerned statutory authorities”.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) has released the Draft UGC (Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2017. As the name suggests, the aim of the draft is to create academic awareness about responsible conduct of research and prevention of misconduct including plagiarism in academic writing. The draft also seeks to establish institutional mechanism for promotion of academic integrity and develop systems to detect and prevent plagiarism.

In order to improve the quality of published research and to crack down on so-called ‘predatory’ academic publishers – who charge fees to authors but fail to provide adequate quality control, or make misleading claims about their quality – India’s University Grants Commission (UGC) has published lists of approved journals for publishing research papers. The UGC, a statutory body that oversees university education in India, has now linked academic promotions and recruitment to its system of Academic Performance Indicators which will only recognise papers published in journals that are on the approved lists.

Universities across the country may now have to resort to cashless means like bank transfers, cheques and credit/debit cards while making use of periodic funds from University Grants Commission (UGC). The commission said the move was in order to bring in accountability, transparency and seamlessness in the process of transfer of grants. The commission said it has virtually made payments cashless and decreased the interface between stakeholders and employees of the organisation.

The Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) is in talks with HRD Ministry, CBSE, AICTE, Medical Council of India (MCI) and other educational bodies to introduce course content on corruption and ethics to make the students aware of the scourge and its consequences. If implemented, students in schools and colleges will soon be imparted lessons on the menace of corruption, its debilitating impact on socio-economic sphere and ways of tackling it.

The government plans to bring in a law to stop rampant plagiarism in academia, with punishment ranging from a warning to deregistration in the case of students and dismissal from service for teachers. Higher education regulator University Grants Commission (UGC) is finalising a draft law — the first of its kind — that is likely to be sent to the human resource development ministry for further action by June-end. Official sources said the government intends to seek parliamentary approval for the law this year itself.

THE HRD Ministry is set to launch a programme next month that would probably be the world’s largest student tracking system, sources said. Shala Asmita (All School Monitoring, Individual Tracing Analysis) Yojana (SAY) aims to track the educational journey of close to 25 crore school students from Class I to Class XII across 15 lakh schools in the country. This online database will carry information about student attendance and enrolment, mid-day meal service, learning outcomes and infrastructural facilities, among other things, on one platform for both private and government schools.

Concerned over fake universities duping students in the country, a Parliamentary panel has sought "exemplary" action against such bodies and those who violate UGC guidelines. In another significant observation, the panel focused on issues related to corruption in All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The panel recommended that the HRD ministry improve the accountability and strengthen vigilance mechanism in AICTE.

Although there has been an enormous expansion in higher education in India over the past 30 years there is still a huge problem around quality. In 2013 the Indian government launched a new higher education improvement programme. Australian universities can help by: training staff, rooting out corruption, sharing knowledge on access, and establishing research partnerships.