the deeper problem is moral the authorities know that but there is complete inaction to resolve the problem said a former vice chancellor of a central universitygarbage research fake internshipssenior educationist and former all india council for technical education aicte chairman s s mantha said the main issue is that naacs evaluation being a quantitative process is now being gamed explaining the method mantha said chart out all the 1000 key indicators under the seven criteria and put down the maximum achievable score and work backwards to create necessary documents he explained that for instance naac assigns 25 for research and innovation based on paperspublished by faculty towards this phd students are now enrolled in large numbers especially in deemed universities and each one is asked to publish at least two papers in a year 50006000 research papers are churned out in this way but their relevance and quality are a matter of debate it is just a big printing press internationally recognised rankings such as qs times higher education or academic ranking of world universities too assign high weightage to research about 50 but while naac merely asks for the number of phd students and papers published other international ranking agencies further quiz universities on connecting research with industry on patents granted or new products or processes devised today indian deemed universities have a fullfledged patent office on their campus the good ones and the ones pretending to be good so they know the game added manthathree years ago the aicte also mandated internships among the parameters used to judge an institute close to a million students now wait in queue for one every year in states like kerala odisha and parts of the northeast it is impossible that every child will get an internship because there are few industries so today india has many edtech firms that are ready to give internships tohundreds of students if a college agrees to use their software services similarly in case of placements companies offer thousands of jobs but these students are benched for months after their graduation has naac ever called a graduate to ask if she actually has a jobugc sitting on recommendationsa former vc of mumbai university described the rot as very old a niti aayog committee appointed by the prime minister in 2017 said the existing accreditation system driven by naac and nba suffers from poor coverage of institutions and lack of credibility among the public at large it had recommended that naacs monopoly be broken and thirdparty agencies be allowed to accredit institutes but these suggestions were not implemented by the university grants commissionas a former iit director said india has a regulatory system which was set up when the size of the higher education system was x today the size is 4x we need to reinvent mechanisms of governance there is a stress on the entire system and the business of rating that india follows currently has been outdated for a decade in fact