The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has recommended a revamp of the higher education scene in India to make education more student-centric and multi-disciplinary. A new initiative stemming from this desire is an ‘Academic Bank of Credits’ (ABC) in higher education idea, which was notified recently by the University Grants Commission (UGC) for implementation. Theoretically, this idea can usher in positive disruption in the jaded higher education sector in the country. But, in reality, this disruption is more likely to usher in chaos.
Why ABC
The idea is very simple and appealing. Any undergraduate or postgraduate student can create an account in the ABC portal and store information of his/her completed courses (i.e., subjects/papers in old terminology) and grades obtained. These grades are stored for a period of five years. Thus, for example, if any student needs to get back to education after a break or has to relocate to another city, they can easily ‘carry’ forward their completed credits. But that is not all. As multiple institutes are connected to the ABC portal, one can be formally enrolled in university ‘A’ but can choose to do some courses from university ‘B’, some more from university ‘C’ and so on and all of these would count towards the student’s degree. In principle, I may be enrolled in a B.Sc. Physics course in a college in Mumbai but find that my college does not offer an elective course in nuclear physics. This is no problem at all. I can enrol myself in an equivalent course from another college in the same city or join online courses offered by other universities; I can even enrol myself in SWAYAM (a programme initiated by the Government of India) or the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) and add these credits to my ABC. I could even choose an online elective course, say in Tamil literature or archaeology or pedagogy. Thus, education will truly become flexible and interdisciplinary, without forcing any single institute to float an unmanageable number of courses. Even if the student does not care about interdisciplinary electives, this flexibility will offer them a chance to enrol in a course and learn from teachers from some of the best institutes such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) or the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research.
