Mumbai: The Maharashtra Government is planning to take several steps to make higher education accessible to all students in the state. 

These steps will primarily be aimed at adding uniformity of degrees and uniformity in syllabi to enable easy transfer of students from one university to the other, introduction of semester & credit system and funding of permanent affiliation to higher education colleges.

According to former Maharashtra Governor, Mr. S.M. Krishna, a committee was formed to look into finalizing such student-friendly steps. The committee, which was established in March this year, intends to finalize all facets before the beginning of the next academic session.

"Several facets linked to upgrading quality, administrative and financial matters are being discussed. The changes will be added in the coming academic session", said an official.

Commenting on whether the committee will be in a position to incorporate the changes before the commencement of the next academic session, the official added, "Except one or two steps, everyone's agreed on most of the issues which were proposed. The recently launched committee will also plane on bringing about some kind of regularity in fees across colleges and universities".

Under the new agenda, the State government would work towards the appointment of principals for a definite time to bring in some kind of consistency; introduction of various training programmes for the non-teaching staff, refresher programmes for the teaching staff and examinations linked to promotion of both teaching and non-teaching staff.

According to the official, "Teachers should upgrade their knowledge and they should be aware of what is happening around the world and involve facets in their teaching mythologies which will ultimately help students to gain more knowledge. For this, we need to give a deep look at the refresher programmes for teachers".