CBSE amends affiliation by-laws, leaves infrastructural audit to states

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has revamped its norms for granting affiliation to schools, leaving the onus of the infrastructural audit on states and limiting its own role to academic quality monitoring.

Union HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar announced Thursday that the affiliation by-laws of the CBSE have been completely revamped to ensure speed, transparency, hassle-free procedures and ease of doing business with the board.

"The new by-laws denote a major shift from the highly complex procedures followed earlier to a simplified system based on preventing duplication of processes. At present, for issuing recognition under the RTE Act and the NOC, the state education administration verifies various certificates to be obtained from local bodies, revenue and cooperative departments. CBSE re-verifies them after the applications are received and hence the process becomes long drawn," he told reporters here.

"The board will now not revisit any of the aspects vetted by the state during its inspection and the delay due to scrutiny and non-compliance of deficiencies in these documents shall be drastically curtailed. Inspection of schools by the CBSE will now be outcome-based and more academic and quality-oriented," Javadekar added.

The CBSE has 20,783 schools affiliated to it across the country and abroad, with over 1.9 crore students and more than 10 lakh teachers. The affiliation by-laws were formulated in the year 1998 and were last modified in 2012.

"The inspection by the CBSE will focus on academic excellence and progress of students over time, innovations and quality of pedagogy, capacity of teachers and teacher training, inclusive practices in school, quality of co-scholastic activities, whether the curricular load is as per norms and whether there is adequate emphasis on sports," he said.

According to the new norms, the pendency of the applications will also be dealt with seriously and the applications will henceforth be disposed of in the same year, and the entire process will be online.

The new provisions mandate schools to make full disclosure of fee structure and prohibit them from levying any hidden charges, Javadekar said.