Premier Institute Identifier for Education

Premier Institute Identifier for Education

On completion of school education, a student seeks admissions in Higher Education, Vocational Education to develop occupational skills or Sports Academy. Similar to the process of admissions in Schools, the students look out for a list of higher education institutes with affiliation status, sanctioned seats, admission criteria, courses offered, financial assistance etc. In the current scenario, all this information is maintained by several entities (affiliation/statutory bodies, institutes etc.) in isolation resulting in duplication and inconsistency. This makes it difficult for students to find relevant information about an institute from a trusted source. Further, it is made more difficult and tedious, if the student is also looking to study abroad.

Public Digital Platform for Education could be envisaged as unifying isolated systems with the creation of an Institute Registry with a unique identifier where all the such institutes through consent-based mechanism supported by new age technologies would interact with the data available across entities. As a result, students will have a more accurate picture of the institute’s profile, while making the search easier for other stakeholders within and outside the education system.

Institute Registry

The Institute Registry is a repository for fundamental data that acts as a sacrosanct source of truth to facilitate seamless integration by other applications/platforms. The objective is to avoid duplication and ensure delivery of integrated quality services while maintaining basic data consistency. The core data elements for institute need to be identified and standardised for the registry to ensure their smooth interoperability.

Institute

Institute is an entity which imparts education (play-school, primary, secondary, higher/professional, vocational/industrial etc) and is approved, authorized or recognized by a competent authority. Each institute needs to be compliant with the standards set by regulatory bodies like School Education Boards, Universities, NCVT etc. Currently, all these institutes are referred with multiple identities maintained for various applications pertaining to affiliations, admissions, scholarships, career counselling etc. deterring efficient information exchange between co-related systems. Unique identification of each facility becomes crucial for parametric performance assessment, direct benefit transfer like scholarships, uniforms etc. and other monitoring of sustainable development goals for education domain at State/Centre level.

Thoughtful efforts have resulted in unique identifiers such as UDISE, AISHE and NCVT codes for Schools, Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) and Industrial Training Institutes/Centers (ITIs/ITCs) respectively covering most of the institutes in India. Unified District Information on School Education is the largest management information system on school education providing UDISE code to schools and capturing primary information regarding infrastructure and student enrolment. Similarly, the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) keeps track of HEIs, their faculty/staff, infrastructure, courses, and enrolments, among other things. There are two types of codes used (Institute and NCVT Codes).

Due to the semantic nature of codes (i.e. dependency on State/District, status, rural/urban etc), it is cumbersome to monitor prolonged impact of beneficiary schemes either due to changes in codes for same institute upon reorganisation of State, District, Village, town etc or retaining the same code thus violating the basic nomenclature of identifier. Current coding schemes should be extended in this way, while sticking to basic unique identifier designs/principles to ensure long-term stability, privacy, and multilingual support. In addition to this there may be several institutes which are not covered in any of these information systems.

Premier Institute Identifier for Education (PInE)

Premier Institute Identifier for Education or “PInE” can be a unique identification number which can be used across all applications pertaining to affiliations, accreditations, rankings, admissions, counselling, scholarships etc. PInE will serve the purpose of uniquely identifying educational institutes such as schools, colleges, standalone institutes, universities, ITIs, other technical/vocational training institutes.

Most importantly, it would benefit all the key personas (Learners, Parents, Teachers, Administrators and Community Members) interacting through generalized scenarios: Learn, Help Learn and Manage Learn as defined in National Digital Enterprise Architecture (NDEAR) by providing a unified view of institutes from diverse federated systems. Stakeholders would be able to share the digital academic assets like UPI model, which uses mobile number linked to various kinds of financial accounts for making transactions. Similarly, PInE linked with multiple codes can be used to avail different services including institute profile, staff/faculty positions, enrolments, courses offered, academic records, examinations, admissions, rankings etc.

Way Forward

Although verification and generating identification numbers for such a large number of institutes can be a daunting task, it can be implemented in a phased manner. In the initial phase, the focus can be on generating PInE from existing MIS systems (UDISE, AISHE, NVTS-MIS) where the database is readily available and, slowly it can be extended to the rest, including foreign institutes. A POC has been completed to create an institute directory (eideas.nic.in) using UDISE, AISHE, Scholarship applications. New entrants can be easily considered by providing tools and creating policies and procedures for identification, verification, generation, consent-based data sharing etc.

References