National Digital University, announced in the last budget session of parliament, is expected to start its operations this year. Initially, it will only offer certificate and diploma courses to its students with plans to provide degree courses later on. Enrollment is open to all students. NDU is the government's solution to the problem of shortage of seats in higher education institutions.
The digital content for various courses will be hosted on the Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) platform. The IT and administrative services will be provided through the government's Samarth portal. NDU aims to give students the liberty to design their own courses. Students will have two options through which they can obtain degrees.
One option is to acquire 50% credits from one of the partner universities, say Banaras Hindu University, and the rest from any institution of choice. The degree that will be awarded to the student in this case will originate from the institution through which the 50% credits were accumulated.
Another option is to accumulate credits from different institutions such that credits from one college do not amount to 50% of the total tally. In this case, the degree will be awarded to the student by National Digital University.
The NDU is supposed to function a lot like online course providers like Udemy, SkillShare and UpGrad. Here, the students can browse multiple courses offered under a single discipline and choose one that fulfills their learning needs. The only difference between these platforms and NDU is that the former only provides e-certificates (degrees from international academic institutions in the case of UpGrad) whereas the latter awards degrees, diplomas and certificates from recognised Indian Universities.
According to a report by News18 in October 2022, there are four universities that have been shortlisted to partner with NDU. However, UGC has not released any official list regarding this yet. These include the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, Delhi University (DU), Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU).
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