Publication | Is UGC recognition mandatory for your online degree

By Harleen Kaur

On August 15, my write-up on the status of online legal courses in India was published by The Financial Express. 

Here are the excerpts:

"Although the online education system in India has been catching up, the same cannot be said about the regulatory body of these courses. There exists a problem of the absence of a permanent body overseeing distance online courses by universities, a task that was previously handled by the Distance Education Council (DEC) at IGNOU until 2012 and is now being handled by the Distance Education Bureau (DEB) of the UGC.

The HRD ministry had notified of the above change in its circular dated 29.12.2012. DEB was formed to conduct the process in the interim, while the draft Distance Education Council of India Act of 2014, which is supposed to be an independent organisation taking care of distance education in India, has not seen the light of day. DEB is still the authorising body for these courses.

After its formation, DEB decided to change its methods of approval as compared to the erstwhile DEC, and institutions were asked to get approvals not only for running distance education programmes, but also to get specific programmes approved by it.

In fact, in an undated document uploaded by DEB, it claims to have decided on 83 out of 205 pending applications with them.

After its establishment in 2013, DEB has been surprisingly slow in granting recognition to new courses or institutes that were not granted automatic approval in 2013. Applications are invited only from those institutes that already run recognised courses in the past year, in essence monopolising a promising industry against well-deserved players.

With UGC trying to weed out institutions that run the danger of becoming “degree mills”, there is also a question mark regarding the process being followed to grant acceptance for new courses because of large pendency."

You can read the whole article here: http://www.financialexpress.com/industry/jobs/is-ugc-recognition-mandatory-for-online-legal-courses/347586/