Bhubaneswar: As part of 5T model of governance, the state government has planned to issue higher education certificates and mark-sheets online from next financial year.
Higher Education secretary Saswat Mishra Thursday asked the vice chancellors of all state-run universities and principals of all government and non-government autonomous colleges to mandatorily use National Academic Depository (NAD) for online issuance of academic certificates and mark-sheets.
Under the Odisha Right to Public Services Act-2012 (ORTPSA), academic certificates and mark-sheets are mandated to be issued to students within stipulated time.
“Under the 5T initiative, the state government has decided to convert more and more physical service delivery systems to online service delivery systems. Therefore, universities and colleges need to switch over to online service delivery system at the earliest,” Mishra wrote to the VCs.
All universities and colleges were instructed to use NAD instead of each institution individually developing its own online service delivery module.
NAD is an initiative of Ministry of Education (erstwhile Ministry of Human Resources Development) to facilitate digital issuance, storage, access and verification of academic certificates issued by academic institutions.
NAD intends to do away with difficulties/inefficiencies of collecting, maintaining and presenting physical certificates. UGC is the authorised body for implementation of NAD through DigiLocker.
Once the system is implemented, students can immediately get their academic certificates and there won’t be any need to visit anywhere to apply and collect the same. Permanent record of certificates would be available online all the times and there will be no risk of losing, spoiling and damaging the certificates, Mishra pointed out.
Similarly, it will also benefit the institutions. The colleges will no more be required to print and distribute the documents physically. The certificate records can be maintained in well-organised IT system for long period.
The employer can also make verification of certificate records easily. No risk of relying upon fake and forged certificates and the move will reduce cost, time and efforts for verification.
Besides, past academic certificates and mark-sheets issued from 2015 calendar year and onwards will be available in NAD by March-end 2021.