Soon after Kuwait decided to only recognize India’s NBA approved engineering degree courses, the HRD ministry has sent a list of top engineering colleges of India to the authorities of the Gulf country. Thousand of Indian engineerings who have passed their courses from the premiere institutes like IITs are on the verge of losing their jobs in Kuwait because of this decision.
The Public Authority for Manpower which is a government body of Kuwait had issued a circular last year which asked the labour department to not provide work permits to students who live outside their country unless they have no-objection certificates from the Kuwait Engineering Society. For the Indian engineers, no-objection certificates were only to be offered to have students who have studied a course accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA).
Problems arose for the students who have pursued their engineering degrees from some of the top institutes of India. Institutes like IISC, IITs and Jadavpur University (Kolkata), some of the NITs never bothered to take accreditation from NBA for their B.Tech courses.
Since the Kuwait Government took such a decision, the HRD ministry of India has been receiving representations of the Indian engineers working in the Gulf country regarding this. A senior HRD minister said that a high level delegation from India was sent to Kuwait in order to gauge and solve the issue through the process of discussion with the Kuwait authorities. It was then decided that the Indian government will send the list of ‘Non-NBA’ topmost institutes and the Indian Institutes of National Importance.
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The NBA is responsible for accrediting Indian engineering courses. While on the other hand, the colleges and universities offering general courses are accredited by National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC). It is to be noted that earlier NBA was a wing of the AICTE which is the All India Council of Technical Education. It became an autonomous institute in the year 2010, since then it has accredited almost 600 institutes out of 3,500 institutes in the country which offer technical courses.