Indian institutions can offer twinning programmes, says higher education secy

Universities and colleges in India will soon be able to give an option to their students to go to any educational institutions abroad for a year as part of their degree programme, said Satyanarayan Mohanty, secretary, department of higher education. Formal norms will be announced soon, he added.

According to Mohanty, educational institutions in the country will be allowed to have twinning programmes wherein a student could complete some part of his or her course here and the rest in any partner institute abroad. After this, he or she will be given a degree from the Indian educational institutions.

The concept of twinning programmes started in India in the mid-1990s. It is a process where students can complete part of their studies in India and the rest in a foreign college, with which the students' college has a tie-up. This is much cheaper than pursuing degrees abroad.

"If an institute abroad wishes to give a degree, after a student completes twinning programme and gets an Indian degree, it may do so," he added.

In the US, the duration of undergraduate programmes is four years compared with the three years in India.

After a student completes three-year programme (with one year abroad) and wishes to study one more year in the US and get a degree, it will also be allowed.

Many institutes already have such arrangements with universities abroad, though there are now formal rules governing this. Chennai-based SRM University has a twinning structured as two+two programme.

Students enrolling with SRM for an undergraduate engineering programme will complete two years of study in India and later move to any partner university campus in other countries and complete the rest of the study in two years to secure Bachelors of Technology from SRM or a Bachelor of Science from the foreign university.

Mohanty said the higher education department has started preparing a ranking and accreditation framework in India.

He added while there are thousands of institutes, not all of them would be relevant from an international partnership perspective. He said it would be outcome and output based.

He added committees have been set up to look into the working of University Grants Commission (Hari Gautam Committee) and All India Council for Technical (M K Kaw Committee) and that the government will take a view on it in the next three-four months.

These committees have been set up to review and restructure regulatory bodies to meet the contemporary needs of educational institutions and the industry.

Mohanty said community colleges would drive the next phase of growth and help have flexible credit and credit transfer along with vocational education.