Patna: Patna University on Friday became the first state-run varsity in Bihar to sign an agreement with the National Securities Depository Limited (NSDL) for digitisation of student's academic records.

All the undergraduate and postgraduate academic records such as students provisional pass certificate, migration, college leaving certificate, mark sheets, etc, will be uploaded at varsity website. Students will be provided email id and password for assessing their certificates from the website.

Patna University registrar Rabindra Kumar and Vikram Jha legal, NSDL representative for Bihar/Jharkhand, signed the agreement.

"Digitisation of academic records is a big achievement for university," said Patna University dean, students' welfare, N.K. Jha. "With digitis ation of academic records students will not have to run to the university for assessing their academic records. Students of Patna University sitting at any place can download their academic records based on their requirement."

With the digitisation of academic records, students will also not have to run to various counters at the varsity office for getting their certificates. The digital certificate will bear the signature of the registrar and examination controller.

In the first phase, the NSDL will digitise certificates of the academic year 2018-19 and later academic records of previous years will be digitised.

Welcoming the decision, Kumar Abhinav, an undergraduate student of Patna Science College said: "The university decision will be of great help to students as we can easily assess our certificates from the varsity website. It has been observed that many a time, students pursuing higher studies at different universities or working at different companies have to submit their certificates on the demand of institutions. It becomes tough for a student to come down to Patna and go through the tedious process to access certificates."

The NSDL will also provide training to staff and officials of the varsity's computer department, who will execute the digitisation drive.

For the first two years, the NSDL will offer services free which means that students will not have to pay for assessing their certificates. The university will upload its duly verified and approved data of academic records, courses of constituent colleges and university departments in its system under its digital signature.