A digital database for academic degrees
The
government’s initiative to put in place a National Academic Depository (NAD)
for digitally holding certificates from 10th standard onwards in a central
database, which received cabinet approval in October 2016, is gathering
momentum. “The concept had been in the works for some time wherein the
government wanted to replicate what financial depositories had done in the
capital market—which is the elimination of paper,” said Joydeep Dutta,
executive director and group chief technology officer (CTO), Central Depository
Services (India) Ltd.
HINDUSTAN TIMES A
file photo of college students waiting to collect their certificates. The
expectation from the government’s initiative is that a National Academic
Depository will drastically reduce the incidence of fake degrees.
CDSL
is one of the two financial depositories—the other being NSDL or National
Securities Depository Ltd—working on putting together the NAD through their
subsidiaries— CSDL Ventures Ltd (CVL) and NSDL Database Management Ltd (NDML),
respectively.
Both
these companies have begun reaching out to academic boards, universities and
other institutions recognized by the University Grants Commission (UGC), for
signing them up on the NAD initiative. Regardless of which depository gets
which academic institution on board, the data collected will be “replicated
between the two”, according to Dutta. On their part, academic institutions need
to collaborate with any one depository to avoid duplication of effort.
NAD
was formally launched at the National Convention on Digital Initiatives
organized by the Ministry of Human Resource Development on 9 July in New Delhi,
as part of the government’s Digital India initiative.
The
expectation is that NAD will drastically reduce the incidence of fake degrees.
For instance, the Delhi Police busted a gang providing spurious educational
certificates and degrees in February and recovered 200 fake documents from them
(bit.ly/2wAOiBK).
Estimates
suggest the number of fake degrees across India could swell into thousands.
Experts also hope the NAD will greatly reduce the hassles of accessing and
verifying academic credentials for students, domestic or foreign universities,
human resource (HR) consultants and employers alike. Till date, CVL has
conducted around 20 awareness sessions in different cities to promote the
concept and benefits of a depository. Nearly 250,000 academic records have
already been digitized and, according to Dutta, CVL is signing up five
universities every week on an average.
“A
representative from the company works with a designated official of the
university—typically the controller of examinations, the registrar or the
dean—for the digitization process,” he said. The collaboration involves
agreement to participate in the depository, concurrence on the format or type
data to be uploaded, the fee structure for verification of certificates and
other procedural details. “It’s entirely up to institutions how far back in
time they want to go for uploading the degrees,” said Dutta.
Talking
about the challenges faced in signing up academic institutions, Dutta said
that, initially, they feared losing their revenue stream from the fee charged
for verifying the authenticity of the certificates. So the academic depository
is being “designed keeping these things in mind”, according to Dutta. “We add
our commission, which could be, say 5% or 10%, as agreed upon by the academic
institution; in return, the verification process would become real-time and
would be affordable to a larger number of students. The process would become
hassle-free for students, who typically have to go from one place to another
and often fall prey to touts. Also, they can get the verification done from
anywhere in the world,” he explained.
There
are technical challenges as well. “Each university is at a different level of
maturity in how it functions. Some of them have proper ERP (enterprise resource
planning) systems to handle end-to-end processes from the time of admission to
the awarding of degrees but many others have primitive technology systems,
which are based on FoxPro, Excel, etc,” said Dutta. He added that even the
printers to whom the universities outsource printing of degrees work on
multiple templates and a standardized overall approach is lacking.
This
means that different data fields of a mark sheet or certificate are captured in
differing formats and stored in a variety of software programs. “To tackle the
challenges resulting from this multiplicity, we have created a lot of
‘converters’ to make the data uniform and usable so that analytics can also be
run on the data,” said Dutta.
The
ability to run analytics on this data assumes significance since the government
may want to use the analytics for purposes such as identifying students
eligible for scholarships based on economic, academic and other criteria.
Meanwhile,
even as the government is pushing for Aadhaar to be seeded into academic
records, it is not mandatory yet, said Dutta. Also, the historic data may not
be updated with Aadhaar numbers but, going forward, universities and institutes
“are being instructed to start capturing Aadhaar data” at the time of
admissions from the next academic session.
According
to Dutta, his company applies the same rigorous standards and tools to secure
the data—including firewalls, encryption technology and other safeguards—as
they do with the financial depository. He also clarified that as far as seeding
of the Aadhaar numbers is concerned, “we are not storing any biometric data”.
Experts
in the human resources industry view the establishment of an academic depository
as a positive development. “It would be good to have such a repository as it
would bring in ease of doing things in the education ecosystem, in addition to
acting as a means for background check on candidates being recruited or already
employed with companies,” said K. Sudarshan, vice-president of business
development and chair of the Asia-Pacific region at EMA Partners International,
an executive search firm. However, he added that the impact on senior positions
“will not be that much” because most of the senior recruitments depend on
experience and references.
Source | Mint – The Wall
Street Journal | 8 September 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming
Conference | National
Conference on Transforming Libraries into Knowledge Resource Centres 11th –
12th January 2018, SNDT Mumbai For further details contact Prof Jyoti Bhabal (jyotibhabal@gmail.com )
No comments:
Post a Comment