The Proliferation of Quality Cells: When Assurance Becomes an Obsession

It has been a long time since Quality Assurance Cells (QACs) were established in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across the country. The constitution of Internal Quality Assurance Cells (IQACs), mandated by the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC), was intended to provide a central mechanism to lead, coordinate, and sustain quality enhancement efforts within institutions.

While some HEIs have turned their IQACs into cosmetic appendages—report-churning units that exist mainly to boost numbers for rankings and accreditation narratives—many have embraced the idea meaningfully, using it to nurture quality practices across teaching, learning, and governance. The outcomes are visible, though the excessive documentation that accompanies these efforts often attracts criticism, particularly when it becomes an end in itself, disconnected from real academic practices.

A more recent offshoot of the IQAC framework is the growing number of QACs established at the college level. The Student Quality Assurance Cell (SQAC) was among the first of these experiments. Several institutions now have SQACs with cherry-picked student members tasked with supporting quality initiatives. Yet, it is not clear what these cells achieve that existing mechanisms within the IQAC cannot. If the goal is to collect student feedback or involve learners in quality enhancement, there are simpler, more integrated ways to do this—without multiplying committees and paperwork.

The Department Quality Assurance Cell (DQAC) is another such innovation. It seems to function as a miniature version of the institutional IQAC, customised for departmental use. But in practice, it often replicates rather than supplements existing structures. Unless a department is exceptionally large, creating a DQAC merely adds more files, meetings, and data duplication without any measurable gain.

If this trend continues, we might soon have an entire alphabet of QACs: AQAC, BQAC, CQAC, DQAC, EQAC, FQAC—and beyond. “A” for Academic Quality Assurance Cell, “B” for Bachelor Quality Assurance Cell, “C” for Career Quality Assurance Cell, “E” for Entrepreneurship, “F” for Faculty, “G” for Gender, “H” for Health, “I” for Innovation—and so on. The imagination seems endless, but the outcomes rarely are.

The question, then, is this: does multiplying committees automatically multiply quality? Does a longer list of acronyms guarantee better accreditation scores or stronger institutional culture? An additional Sports Quality Assurance Cell, for instance, hardly seems necessary when the Physical Education Department already functions under clearly defined IQAC frameworks.

In most cases, these additions generate little more than inflated paperwork and ornate terminology. The proliferation of committees often works against the goal of meaningful quality enhancement. It disperses focus, increases administrative fatigue, and leads to non-productive meetings, minutes, and ATRs. Instead of creating a lean and efficient quality system, we end up with meetings about meetings, plans about planning, and actions about acting.

It is time to put quality assurance systems in HEIs into slim mode—to make them truly functional, streamlined, and purposeful. Let us invest our time and energy in systems that work, not in systems that exist merely to be documented.

Babu. P. K., Ph D