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Fostering Social Responsibility & Community Engagement in Higher Education Institutions in India 19

research undertaken by students and faculty of HEIs, if it is undertaken in partnership
with them. Students thus gain a sense of satisfaction about their research making a useful
contribution to society through community engagement.

3. Implementation Strategy
Certain key steps are required for effective implementation of this national framework on
‘fostering social responsibility and community engagement ‘in HEIs in the country. In
this section, both short-term and long-term steps have been described:

1. UGC should organise consultations with universities in different regions to deliberate
upon the ways in which these recommendations can be implemented by each of them.
These consultations can be hosted by regional offices of UGC.

2. Building competencies in community engagement amongst selected university staff
is critical for its success. Such capacity building can have several components. First,
short orientation programmes for senior leadership of HEIs should be hosted in such
universities that already have good practices of community engagement (as GRI, DEI,
BPS, Amrita, etc.). Second, participating universities should be supported to develop
operational plans to design the launch of new compulsory course.

3. UGC should get an online self-paced MOOC course (in several languages) prepared
soon so that classroom based teaching material for compulsory community engagement
course is ready before next academic year begins.
4. A professional development course for preparing faculty of participating HEIs can be
organised and supported by UGC to build professional competencies amongst facilitators
of community engagement in participating universities. Such Master Trainers can then
support further professional capacity development in community engagement through
teaching and research. Existing Faculty Development Programmes can be utilised for
building such competencies in rural engagement. MGNCRE (under MHRD), in
partnership with PIA, is already conducting such a professional development course
on facilitating community engagement in HEIs (www.ncri.org; ww.pria.org)

5. In order to enable students and faculty to undertake research in partnership with local
communities, it is important that training programmes in CBPR are organised as an
integral part of support to participating HEIs. Such training in CBPR requires learning
of competencies in partnership research, and should be supported by UGC for effective
implementation of fostering social responsibility.

6. Universal experience suggests that participating HEIs must create a mechanism for
interface with communities.10Several examples in this document show how such a
Centre can bring university-wide involvement of students and faculty in community
engagement. Such a Centre also becomes the window for community and local
institutions to approach for support from the university. UGC should create a scheme
for support to such Centres in participating HEIs.

10 http://unescochaircbrsr.org/pdf/resource/Hall_Budd_StrengtheningCommUniversityPartnerships_2017rev.pdf