Students with Education from Abroad to Avail Jobs Without Certificate Evaluation

A student completing his studies from abroad, will have easier access to jobs in India. Countries that have an agreement of educational recognition with India, students from that countries will be able to pursue their higher education or even apply for public jobs in India without any evaluation of their foreign educational certificates.

Now, certificates from foreign non- professional colleges can be recognised by India, if these countries does the same for Indian institutional credentials. This has been recommended by the HRD Ministry on the "principle of academic sovereignty"

The principle suggests India to get into agreements with those countries which bear "a rigorous, robust and credible" system.

"Under the agreement, both countries shall unconditionally recognise all qualifications awarded by recognised/accredited higher educational institutions in the respective countries and shall treat all such qualifications as equivalent to their qualifications level by level," the committee said.

The loophole to this law is that in case education is a provincial subject in a country or the institutions are autonomous, an agreement cannot be signed. In those cases, the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) and a similar body of the foreign nation can go into an agreement. Thereby, certificates from those institutes which are members of the association will be recognised as equivalent.

The AIU, headed by University Grants Commission Chairman Ved Prakash, was appointed in May 2015 with the aim to bring the importance of UK degrees and Indian degrees to the same level.

However, in professional qualification courses such as medicine, law or engineering, the present process will continue, which entails seeking recognition approval from the respective professional councils.

Foreign qualifications awarded through correspondence, distance, open, online, or virtual learning courses have also been excluded for this process.

However, this move will affect the Indian students who studied abroad. The AIU norms require full-time regular mode courses having the same duration as Indian institutions which can be seen as a negative to the same. As per the AIU norms, they might be denied equivalence, as they would have studied for a shorter duration than the minimum required in India for an equivalent qualification. Lets see how the process goes and will the students turn out to be happy or mad with the same.