What is Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyaan (RUSA)?

Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyaan (RUSA), emphasises to promote reforms in the State Higher Education System by creating a facilitating institutional structure for planing and monitoring at the state level.

It will help to promote autonomy in state universities and include governance in the institutions. One of the goals of RUSA is to ensure academic examination reforms in the higher education institutions and enable conversation of some of the universities into research universities at par with the best in the world.

The project was launched recently on 8th June 2013, it was implemented by HRD Ministry as a centrally sponsored scheme with matching contribution from the State Government and Union Territories. It is proposed to set eligibility criteria for states to achieve a high and sustained impact of the project through monitoring and evaluation. The primary responsibility of the monitoring will lie with the institution themselves.
The state government and the center through The Project Appraisal Board will monitor the project annually. The main component of the programme is to set up new universities and upgrade existing autonomous colleges to universities.

The other attempt will be to convert colleges to cluster universities and set up new model colleges. The strategy will also include converting existing degree colleges to model colleges.