Even though the movement to specify frameworks for higher education qualifications had gained momentum across the world in the late 1990s, India remained without a National Higher Education Qualifications Framework (NHEQF) until recently. The idea was deliberated at the 60th meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education in 2012, which assigned the responsibility to the University Grants Commission (UGC). The issue has been hanging fire since. That it has now come up with a NHEQF is welcome, but the UGC must remove all the confusion about higher education qualifications, which arise because of the multiplicity of guidelines, frameworks and documents in the country.
The problem of plenty
Globally, higher education qualification frameworks include details of the definition and requirements of credits. The UGC has chosen to prescribe two separate frameworks — the NHEQF and the National Credit Framework. Higher educational institutions are separately required to implement the Academic Bank of Credits as a mandated modality for recognising, accepting, and transferring credits across courses and institutions. Additionally, there are many other regulations that impinge on higher education qualifications. All of these could have been integrated into the NHEQF. This defeats the purpose of prescribing a qualification framework. After all, a qualification framework must minimise ambiguities in comprehending qualifications in a cross-cultural context.
