‘Govt to speed up uploading documents to National Academic Depository’

Bengaluru: The uploading process of all academic records of students to the National Academic Depository (NAD) will speed up and all necessary arrangements are being done towards this end, informed Deputy Chief Minister Dr.CN Ashwath Narayan.

The press statement by Narayan who is also the Minister of Higher Education in the state read, “Three committees comprising of Empowered Committee, Steering committee and project management unit have been entrusted to ensure the implementation at the earliest.”

As per the statement, the Empowered group headed by Deputy Chief Minister and Higher Education Minister will make a quarterly review of the project progress. The steering group headed by Principal Secretary/Secretary of Higher Education will make a monthly review and the Project Management Unit headed by a Project Director from Centre for E-Governance would drive the project execution at the ground level.

“Uploading of all the documents of the students, starting from 10th class to post-doctoral to NAD needs to be completed. This will help students, education institutions, and employers to access certificates such as convocation certificates, mark sheets, and skill certificates. This also ensures safe storage, easy retrieval, and elimination of fraudulent practices such as unreasonable service fees, faking/forging of certificates and mark sheets”, the Deputy Chief Minister explained.

He further said that the NAD was also expected to end the existing challenges such as having academic records in physical paper form, mutilation and loss of physical documents, time-consuming document retrieval process, and difficulty in proving authenticity.

“This NAD (central digital depository of academic certificates) is also said to be risk-free besides ensuring safe record keeping, efficient record retrieval, and enabling quick and reliable verification. It is also viewed as a step forward in the direction of the ‘Digital India’ drive”, he added.

According to the statement, this process involves Academic Institutions (AI) uploading digitally signed certificates on NAD with students’ Digi-Locker ID and other relevant details. Students have to get registered on NAD via Aadhar Number and claim his/her certificates. Upon completion of e- KYC, they can automatically claim the digital certificates from the NAD portal without applying to academic institutions (AIs). They also can share their verified certificates with employers and other stakeholders by giving the link.

NAD System will store digitally signed awards in a standardized format and after uploading by AI, provides access to the student to his/her certificate. Verifier can verify academic records/mark sheets on NAD after the student gives access.