Expert Committee Formed to Frame Guidelines for Maharashtra Colleges

The Maharashtra government has appointed an eight-member expert committee to formulate ‘clear and detailed’ norms and guidelines for approving new colleges and courses in the state.

All the universities of the state and the Department of Higher and Technical Education will follow the guidelines worked out by the expert committee, for approving new colleges and courses. A lot of confusions, regarding admissions in the new colleges of the state, have been prevailing as of now.

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Former Vice Chancellor of North Maharashtra University, Dr. RS Mali will lead the committee and study the old norms completely before framing the new guidelines. The expert committee is expected to submit the draft guidelines to the state government by 25 February 2017.

The norms of sanctioning new curriculum, courses, colleges and additional divisions have been determined under section 83, 82, 81 of Maharashtra Universities Act 1994. One of the members of the committee and principal of a reputed college in Mumbai said that though there were norms and guidelines on sanctioning new colleges in the old act, the Maharashtra government wanted an expert committee to review these guidelines. The government wants to strengthen them in order to raise the quality of higher education in the state and make it more pragmatic with the changing times. Now, approving a new law college will no more be a simple affair. There will be a number of regulative processes involved in the same.

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Over the years, approval of the new colleges has been a big problem. Experts had alleged that the burden on the University has been increasing as colleges are approved without any proper scrutiny. Right now, 740 and 811 colleges are affiliated to Mumbai University and Pune University respectively.