Government launches a ‘Know Your College’ Portal
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
July 3, 2015
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has launched a Know Your College (KYC) portal that promises to be a one stop shop for students and parents to know about various colleges in the country. The portal is updated with relevant information about every college like lab facilities, faculty, intake, hostel facilities, library etc.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) launched a ‘Know your College’ portal in November 2014. Since this is the time for college admissions, MHRD has once again reminded the citizens about the existence of this portal.
In a press release, the MHRD spoke about the information available on the portal. The Press Release said, “There is often confusion in the minds of students regarding which colleges to join and the courses to be taken up. To help the students make an informed decision on the choice of college and the courses, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India has developed a “Know Your College” portal”
What does the portal promise?
The Portal promises to be a one stop shop for a student in making an informed choice about a college. This portal covers almost 10,500 colleges which conduct about 14,000 programs in Technical Education and 35000 colleges conducting at least 20,000 programs in Non-Technical education. The government says that the portal is a repository of information pertaining to colleges and information related to its faculty, labs, library, infrastructure, and availability of hostel facilities etc. The MHRD is also encouraging students to send their complaints about discrepancies in the information provided by colleges through this portal. This portal is being maintained by AICTE.
Does the Portal live up to its promise?
When one does a search using any of the search criteria, the list of colleges is displayed with details like the name of the college, type of the institute, Courses offered, address and the URL of the website. Some details are not accurate.
When you further click on the name of any of the college, the detailed information about the college is displayed. The college name, address, Name of the parent organization, year of establishment, name of the contact person etc are displayed. One can also check list of courses offered, intake for the current year, annual fees, details of laboratories present, details of faculty, Library, Hostel, details of the ombudsman, anti-ragging committee and also the student count.
The portal does give some important information at one place for all parents and students. The portal also gives information about other initiatives of the government like the e-learning platforms, student scholarships and other useful information.
The portal also provides a lot of other useful information to the students like the ‘Project Factory’ where students can upload and download various projects. The students are also encouraged to submit grievances and complaints.
Overall, the portal is a good initiative that will help students & parents in getting relevant information about various colleges. The challenze is in updating this data regularly and ensuring that the data is accurate. AICTE should also ensure that a system is set in place to deal with the complaints lodged and clear them within a time frame.