-Mita Mukherjee
In a move to streamline the process of granting no objection certificates (NOC) to private schools, the West Bengal government on Thursday launched a portal that would enable unaided institutions to seek the NOCs through online process.
The entire process of granting NOCs, starting from submission of the applications seeking NOCs to the state school education department to issuing of the certificates to the institutions will be done through online process, Bratya Basu, Bengal education minister said launching the portal on Thursday.
Having a NOC from the state government is mandatory for all private schools following the CBSE, ICSE and ISC curriculum. The schools can apply for the affiliation from the boards under which they want to get affiliated only after getting the NOCs from the state government.
As of now, the whole process is done through offline mode.
The new portal will not only have features to facilitate the proces of granting the no objections but it would also ensure transparency in the system, a senior official of the school education department said.
Under the existing system, issuing of the NOCs would often get delayed mainly because most applicant schools would not submit the required information and documents at the time of submitting the applications.
After checking the applications, the department would now have to write to the errant schools to rectify the mistakes. The schools would then have to visit the education department office at Salt Lake in Kolkata and do the needful resulting into delays in completing the process of issuing the NOCs.
These difficulties can be removed with the launching of the new online system, the education department official said.
Once the online system starts, the applications will get accepted only if all the information provided by the schools are correct. This will automatically reduce the delay in the process of issuing the NOCs.
The online system will be helpful to upcoming schools. But existing schools will also benefit, the official said.
Schools following the curriculum under the Delhi-based CBSE are mostly required to renew their affiliation after every five years. They are required to get fresh NOCs for renewing the board affiliation. Students of such schools would often get inconvenienced due to the delays.
