Samarth portal is trending. This is the vibe one gets these days as one enters the hallowed precincts of the Director of Higher Education premise. Officials are optimistic that the introduction of the Samarth e Gov Suite as a State Policy is going to herald an era of digital governance of higher education in the State. Long battered by allegations of one or the other type, the Directorate has started to ring in technological changes in its drive towards efficiency and transparency. This year’s admission in colleges across the State was one such example of a fully transparent and hassle-free college admission process.
With the rolling out of the Four Years Undergraduate Programme (FYUGP) as per the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020, the higher education sector in the State has undergone a major change beginning the 2020-2021 (2023-2024) academic session. Simultaneously, the Government of Assam, for the first time, operationalised a centralised admission process by deploying Samarth e-Gov Suite – a technology tool initiated by the Union Ministry of Education to facilitate e-Governance in higher education.
OSD, Directorate of Higher Education and State Nodal Officer, Samarth-e-Govt. Assam, Pranjal Pratim Barua told Asom Barta that after initial hiccups and aversion among institutions to adopt newer technology, things have gone from good to better.
Barua said that the Ministry of Education had suggested States to use the Samarth portal developed by it to smoothen administration of higher education. Accordingly, Assam has decided to introduce the system in the higher education sector, particularly in the students’ admission process. A Samarth team gave a presentation about the system on May 2, 2023 at the Administrative Staff College in Guwahati in the presence of University VCs, Principals of autonomous colleges and Principals of some provincialised colleges.
“We held regular video conferences with colleges and universities on operationalising the Samarth portal in the admission process. Once they realised the efficacy of the system, they welcomed it with open arms,” Barua said.
The Samarth portal includes academic and employee modules besides financial and asset management modules to name a few, of which the academic module is now available for higher education institutions in Assam.
Barua said that there is no platform cost at the user end and each college, university is empowered to manage its own affairs through in-house capacity building.
He added that apart from merit list, it also provided the functionality for generating roll numbers, issue of admit card, university registration and mandatory registration for the Academic Bank of Credit, etc. “This means the entire process from admission to certification can be completed in an integrated manner,” he said.
Barua said that compared to the last academic session, the user base of this digital platform has significantly increased with some private universities adopting it for admission this year. “Based on Samarth data, we could safely conclude that 69% of the total students admitted till July 1 this year qualified for ‘fee waiver’. The benefit of real time availability of dynamic data from this platform is already visible with the State Government handing over funds to colleges and universities against the ‘Pragyan Bharati’ beneficiaries on July 10 this year (Pl see report on Page 10),” Barua told this reporter.
