Four years after the National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions (NCAHP) Act, 2021 came into force, its intent is widely accepted: to bring coherence, standards, and professional legitimacy to a fragmented allied healthcare workforce and curb the proliferation of unregulated institutions. Yet its implementation has generated friction in certain domains – psychology among them, particularly around the status of distance-mode qualifications.
For Monika Misra, a psychology faculty member at Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), this friction is not abstract. Having worked with mental health learners for over a decade – across regions and learner profiles – she encounters its implications daily within programme design, supervision, and student progression.
From Controversy to Practice
The debate over distance-mode education is no longer new. It has been litigated and publicly contested. What is worth revisiting now is what sustained practice reveals about how regulation interacts with capacity-building on the ground.
Sustained implementation now offers something early debates did not: evidence from learning systems operating at scale about how competencies are formed – and whether regulatory responses adequately capture that reality.
“The Act was meant to strengthen the system,” Monika says. “The real question is whether it is learning from the system it is trying to regulate.”
Seeing Regulation from Inside a Scaled System
What distinguishes Monika’s reflections is that they emerge from operating within a large, complex learning ecosystem rather than observing it from above. IGNOU’s psychology programmes were designed to respond to a reality policymakers themselves acknowledge: the shortage and uneven distribution of mental health professionals.
“When you work at this scale, you don’t have the luxury of loose design,” she notes. “Everything – from curriculum to assessment – has to be deliberate, because the learner base is so diverse.”
From this vantage point, regulation is not an external imposition but a daily reference point. The tension arises when regulatory categories simplify what practice has already made complex – replacing observable competencies with easier-to-administer proxies.
“People assume distance automatically signals lower quality,” Monika says. “What matters in our programmes is documented supervision, applied fieldwork, and whether students can translate theory into real settings.”
What Ground-Level Training Reveals About Skill Formation
In distance education, competence cannot be inferred from presence; it must be deliberately designed, monitored, and assessed. Monika describes how applied assignments, supervised field exposure, and continuous evaluation are therefore built into programme structure rather than treated as supplements.
Internship and practicum components serve as structured experiential spaces linking academic instruction to professional contexts. These are complemented by research projects requiring independent inquiry and application of theory. Together, they embed skill acquisition and reflective practice into the curriculum. Many placements involve community clinics, educational institutions, and social-sector organisations, where learners work on real cases under documented supervision.
“Our learners are often already working in communities or institutions,” she says. “If the training doesn’t connect with real situations, it simply fails.”
This challenges the assumption that only continuous physical proximity guarantees competence. In distributed systems, quality must be made visible through structured supervision and performance evaluation. As Monika puts it, “If your pedagogy is weak, it shows very quickly.”
Distance Education as Infrastructure
Monika reframes distance psychology programmes not as substitutes for traditional pathways, but as foundational to mental health capacity.
“We don’t see this only as producing psychologists,” she says. “We see it as building mental health capacity.”
Mental health systems depend not only on licensed specialists but also on individuals equipped to recognise distress, offer initial support, and facilitate referral.
“If we are serious about mental well-being nationwide, we cannot think only in terms of elite pipelines,” she adds.
In this sense, distance education operates as infrastructure. The question is not whether to professionalise, but how to strengthen standards without constricting the architecture that enables reach.
Where Policy Can Learn from Practice
Monika’s reflections do not reject regulation. They argue for aligning it more closely with how competence is actually produced.
“We are not saying ‘don’t regulate’,” she clarifies. “We are saying to regulate what actually produces competence.”
Entry norms, supervised practice requirements, and assessment standards are already embedded within programme design. Evaluation frameworks are periodically revised based on expert review to ensure alignment between learning outcomes and professional expectations.
“These are things we work with every day,” she says. “They are measurable, improvable, and enforceable.”
Regulation is strongest when it draws from such institutional experience rather than relying on delivery format as shorthand. The opportunity before the Act is not retreat, but refinement: aligning its categories more closely with how skills are formed in practice.
A Forward-Looking Reflection
For Monika and many others – learners, faculty and practitioners – revisiting the Act is less about reopening an old dispute and more about recognising how systems mature.
“Policies should get better as systems mature,” Monika observes. “Governance, like education, benefits from iteration.”
Her reflection leaves a quiet but consequential question for policymakers: whether regulation can evolve in conversation with practice, or whether it risks freezing assumptions that the ground has already outgrown.
