New laws to encourage private educational institutes
By IANSMonday, March 8, 2010
NEW DELHI - The government will propose several legislations to encourage private participation in education as the states alone cannot provide resources, Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said Tuesday.
“There are three legislations we are planning to propose for improving higher education in the country, including one allowing domestic and foreign players to set up educational institutes, (and two others for) setting up National Accreditation Authority and the Educational Finance Corporation,” Sibal said.
He was speaking at the Conscious Capitalism Summit organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here.
Sibal said the second legislature would reduce the government’s intervention in the functioning of private institutes.
“The National Accreditation Authority would do all the evaluation process of the institutes as per their declarations made on their websites pertaining to the infrastructure, faculty members, etc. for the quality education,” he said.
The minister also informed the house that the proposal to the Planning Commission for setting up the Educational Finance Corporation would “reduce the fee structures in private institutes as they would be provided with long-term commercial borrowings”.
Through this corporation, students will be able to fund their education without depending on their parents, Sibal said.
“Only about 12 percent students enrolled in schools enter in the colleges for higher education who fall in the age group of 18 to 24 years. We want to increase the resources for them and states alone cannot do it,” Sibal said.
