UGC
Source: Amar Ujala

Officials announced that the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) is all set to provide equivalence to a one-year postgraduate degree from a foreign land.

Under this scheme, a one-year masters’ degree would be given equal weightage to the postgraduate degree offered in India.

This will surely benefit the students who have done or pursuing a 1-year masters’ degree from universities in Ireland, Australia, or the United Kingdom. 

Giving the development details, Pankaj Mittal, secretary-general, Association of Indian Universities contended“We had a discussion regarding this previously, and we are thinking to grant recognition to the one-year master’s course, furnished the credits are same.

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University Grants Commission (UGC) has also put many discussions and debates about this topic but yet no outcome is produced.

 “We are working on this, we have not come to a decision as yet,” the UGC chairman, D P Singh told. 

Momentarily, the UGC only acknowledges the two-year master’s degree course in accordance with the prevailing policy.

Indian students with a one-year postgraduate degree qualification cannot come up for the National Eligibility Test (NET) or UGC – NET in the country. Clearing the NET enables postgraduate students for Junior Research Fellows (JRF) and also for teaching staff at Indian universities.

Foreign Degree parallelism 

The process is going on by the administrative authority, aiding equivalence, and scrutiny of the program. 

The AIU is working on the equivalence part and after that is decided we will go ahead,” added the UGC chairman, DP Singh.

AIU is now helping the conversion from duration to credits. They are glancing at the content and the amount of teaching hours in the European or Australian universities. In India, 15 hours of attending a class are taken as one value point.

If the credits are similar to what we are giving, then we will be able to give distinction,” added AIU secretary-general, Pankaj Mittal.

Approving of equivalence and recognizing the one-year master’s program at par with two years in India is a much-awaited demand.

Earlier Initiatives,  undertaken by UGC

Ex UGC chairman Ved Prakash told a similar endeavor was taken in 2017. We had identified some universities like Jadavpur University and the University of Hyderabad to look for the divisions, if any, in the one-year master’s degree courses provided by the institutes in the UK.

The Indian institutes were willing to offer eight-month bridge programs for those students who were interested in coming back to India. We had persuaded the respective Vice Chancellors to administer the above-stated course.

Jadavpur University’s Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das cheered the move.  Talking about the foreign recognition about masters’ course, told, I feel happy because outside, the teaching method is quite well defined and constructed and due to this, students have to work very hard.

Das repeated that the value of a specific course not only depends on the years but also on the teaching technique and the subject. A course should be very well constructed and very intense. And if it is that there is no reason why that should not be recognized, he added.

Heightening Inequality 

However, the motion has not gone down well with some of the scholars. Why do foreign studying students get recognition in 16 years when our countries’ college students getting the same in 17 years, told DU executive member. 

Aishe Ghosh, President, Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union, said that the unevenness within our society is always there. In order to smash that, the administration has to come out with strategies that break the class divisions in our society.

Pupils also feel that, after getting the recognition, the program would increase the already existing academic inequalities. 

 

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