New Delhi, April 9: A new bill seeks to make the NCERT, the national council that prepares school textbooks, an Institution of National Importance with the powers to award degrees and design its own courses.

It is understood that these degrees and new courses will relate to teacher education, which is the mandate of the 56-year-old council along with advising the central and state governments on school education.

Currently, the council has five Regional Institutes of Education in Ajmer, Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Mysore and Shillong, which are affiliated to local state government-run universities and offer BSc-cum-BEd, BA-cum-BEd and standalone BEd courses.

"Now the council will award its own degrees without having to depend on any local university," former NCERT director Krishna Kumar told The Telegraph, welcoming the government move.

"It will design its own courses and roll them out instead of having to get them approved by the affiliating university. It will hold its examinations in time and not depend on the university's schedule."

As the council's director from 2004 to 2010, Kumar had set up a committee to examine the issue of autonomy for the council. The committee had proposed Institution of National Importance status. Such institutions are de facto universities without actually being called universities.

The human resource development ministry uploaded the draft National Council of Educational Research and Training Bill on its website yesterday and sought public feedback within the next one month.

"(The) NCERT is dependent on the affiliating universities for approval of its courses, and is, therefore, not in a position to introduce further innovations in content of these courses due to the rigid norms of the affiliating universities," says a note uploaded with the draft bill.

Currently, the council's executive committee, headed by the human resource development minister, takes all decisions about its functioning. The bill continues with this arrangement while saying the committee can delegate its powers to its president (the minister).

According to the bill, the executive committee will include the minister as president, his or her junior minister as vice-president, the secretary for school education, the council director and joint director, the chairperson of higher education regulator University Grants Commission, six eminent people and three NCERT teachers nominated by the president, and a bureaucrat each from the human resource development and finance ministries.

The draft bill has done away with the post of Visitor, an office held by the President of India for many other Institutions of National Importance such as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the National Institutes of Technology.

The recently introduced bill on the Indian Institutes of Management, which seeks to turn them into Institutions of National Importance, too does away with the Visitor's post.