Gujarat will be the first state in the country which will conduct its own academic and administrative  audit (AAA) of educational institutes in the state. The Knowledge Consortium of Gujarat (KCG) formed by the state education department will begin Gujarat-AAA to enhance quality of higher education.

The audit will be conducted on the lines of the accreditation done by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) - the autonomous institution established by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

"All educational institutes go for NAAC accreditation once in five years. But the idea of Gujarat-AAA initiative is to have the audit exercise done once in two years or annually. Also, it is more of a mentoring exercise than that of monitoring the educational institutes in the state so that the colleges understand their strengths and weakness," a KCG official told TOI.

While KCG's ultimate aim is to cover all 900 government-run, grant-in-aid, self-financed and private colleges of Gujarat, in the first phase it will conduct audit of 50 government colleges of the state. The consortium had approached M S University (MSU) to identify faculty members and administrative staff, who are familiar with the NAAC accreditation exercise.

"There is an overwhelming response from the university for the project as 110 faculty members including senior professors and teachers and around 50 administrative staff have registered to undergo the two days' training programme which began on Wednesday. After the training, these members will visit different colleges as members of the Gujarat-AAA Peer team on voluntarily basis," professor Sharad Bansal, who is co-coordinating the training programme at MSU said.

"The initiative is directed towards bringing significant qualitative changes including the facilitation of implementing choice based credit system in higher education institutions of the state," added a KCG official. The first phase of the audit which will cover 50 educational institutes of the state is expected to be completed by middle of March after which it will be ready for discussion.

During the training at MSU, faculty members and non-teaching staff is being provided with a toolkit for AAA which has been prepared during workshops by members of internal quality assurance cell and other senior members from universities and private colleges of the state.