HRDD signs MoU with Quality Council of India to grade delivery of education in Sikkim

GANGTOK, 27 March: A Memorandum of Understanding [MOU] on “Accreditation Standard for Quality School Governance” was signed between the Human Resource Development Department and Quality Council of India yesterday.
The MoU was signed by the Commissioner-cum-Secretary, HRDD, R Telang, on behalf of the State Government and the Director, QCI, Bipin Sahani, representing his organization, in the presence of HRDD Minister, NK Pradhan. With this, Sikkim has become the second state in the country, after Bihar, to sign on MoU to accredit the standard for school education.


On the occasion, the Minister also released a book, “Accreditation Standard for Quality School Governance”, which details different parameters for the said accreditation.
In his address, the Minister explained that with this initiative, Sikkim wants to stay ahead in its pursuit of imparting quality education.
He stressed that the state government has begun the mission for quality education and has now solicited the services of QCI to evaluate its performance.
“We don’t want our efforts towards quality education to go in vain and now the QCI is here to grade our efforts,” he said.
The Minister assured all the suggestions and loopholes pointed out by the QCI in its report will be taken up seriously to accelerate the process to bring qualitative improvement in education.
Mr Pradhan further stressed that a good education requires qualitative improvements in the teachers as well and that any effort to strengthen education would require better standardization of the institutions as well.
He also informed that the endeavor is to cover all the government schools in the State in phased manner.
There are a total of 769 government schools in the State.
The Commission-cum-Secretary, in his address, mentioned that the State Government was focused on imparting quality education and is now attempting to standardize quality and evaluate performance by a third party.
He further added that such an initiative would help streamline quality delivery of services.
Mr Telang informed that as per the MoU, all government schools will be covered phase-wise, starting with 10 schools in the initial pilot-project.
He urged the principals and heads of different schools to cooperate in this venture.
Mr Sahani, in turn, explained that QCI was a not-for-profit, autonomous body set up by the Central government and Indian industry to establish and operate a national accreditation structure and to promote quality through a nationwide campaign.
He further explained that the function of the QCI was to support the government’s initiatives in different areas.
Mr Sahani also appreciated the State government’s initiatives towards delivering quality education in the government schools.
He also announced to train 30 teachers in the initial phase- 20 for the awareness campaign and 10 for assessment.
In his welcome address, Director [School Education], CS Rao, informed that with this MoU, government schools will adopt the standard developed by QCI to improve the standard, infrastructure and overall development of schools.
He informed that in the pilot-project, 10 schools from across the state will be selected for the accreditation with the QCI conducting “gap-analysis” for the next 10 schools and thus 20 schools will be immediately benefited.
The function was also addressed by Additional Director HRDD, Mohan Subba.
[SAGAR CHHETRI]