The Union Minister for Finance and Corporate Affairs, Arun Jaitley while presenting the General Budget 2017-18 in Parliament said that the Government proposes to establish a National Testing Agency as an autonomous and self-sustained premier testing organization to conduct all entrance examinations for higher education institutions.
This would free CBSE, AICTE and other premier institutions from these administrative responsibilities so that they can focus more on academics.
Govt also proposed to create innovative fund for secondary education for ensuring universal access, gender parity and quality improvement. Delivering his Budget Speech, the Finance Minister said this will include ICT enabled learning, transformation and the focus will be on 3479 educationally backward blocks.
In higher education, the Government will undertake reforms in the UGC. Good quality institutions would be enabled to have greater administrative and academic autonomy. In his Budget Speech, the Finance Minister said that the colleges will be identified based on accreditation and ranking, and given autonomous status. A revised framework will be put in place for outcome based accreditation and credit based programmes.
