Project Strategy
The project will be implemented in alignment with the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17), based on faster, sustainable, and inclusive growth. It emphasizes increasing the supply of highly-skilled workers to drive the economy, as well as helping low-income states catch up with their more advanced neighbours.
The Project will be implemented through the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) of the Government of India as a Central Sector Scheme (CSS), wherein 100% funds will be provided as grants to the States, Institutions& ATUs.
The funding pattern details with respect to Government funded, Government aided institutions and ATUs are given in Section 6.
A set of Government orders for States and UTs is to be issued to achieve a high and sustained impact of the Project. These orders are to give the project institutions adequate decision making powers that will enable and encourage them to deliver quality education and undertake research in an efficient manner. The primary focus is to increase empowerment of institutions for self-governance and create incentives for achieving excellence in engineering education.
The project institutions will be required to implement academic and non-academic reforms within their self-conceived development programmes that focus on quality and relevance, excellence, resource mobilization, greater institutional autonomy with accountability, research and equity.
Professional development programmes for engineering-education policy planners, administrators and implementers at the Central, State and University levels will beorganized. The Project will also support development of more efficient governance activities.
The Project will lay major emphasis on monitoring and evaluation. The prime responsibility of monitoring will lie with the institutions themselves. The management structure at the Institutional level i.e. the Board of Governors (BoG) along with Head of the institution will monitor the progress of Institutional projects on a regular basis and provide guidance for improving the performance of institution in project implementation. The information from project institutions will be collected through a scalable web-based Management Information System (MIS). State Governments will also regularly monitor and evaluate the progress of institutions. The Government of India and the World Bank will conduct bi-annual Joint Reviews of the Project with assistance from the National Project Implementation Unit (NPIU). The monitoring will be based on Institutional Development Proposals (IDPs) and Action Plans for ATUs prepared by each project institution and achievements will be measured through a set of performance indicators. The monitoring will focus on implementation of reforms by institutions, achievements in project activities under different sub-components, procurement of resources and services, utilization of financial allocations and achievements in faculty and staff development and management development activities.
In the project, the technical assistance to AICTE is planned which will include designing an assessment system to track student learning at different points of the undergraduate program. Surveys of students, faculty, non-teaching staff and administrators will deepen insight into how institutes address specific problems related to student learning. Assessments will be designed to provide feedback to institutes on how and where to improve, without putting undue pressure on students.
In this project, the fund will be linked to the Disbursement Linked Indicators (DLIs) and will be disbursed only after achieving and verification of some of the indicators.