Institutions resent AICTE's mandatory journal order

The bid of technical education regulator, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to push for quality by prescribing mandatory online journals has faced resistance with private institutions terming it a way to provide business to foreign journals.

Updated on: Nov 24, 2011, 23:46:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The bid of technical education regulator, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to push for quality by prescribing mandatory online journals has faced resistance with private institutions terming it a way to provide business to foreign journals.

The AICTE had revised its policy on journals and for the first time has prescribed mandatory subscription of foreign e-journals on computers, engineering, management, pharmacy, architecture, biotechnology and hotel management. The annual subscription costs of these e-journals vary from US $ 1,000 to US $ 6,500.

“Private educational institutions will be providing business worth Rs 1,500 crore to these foreign publishers just because of the AICTE order,” said chairperson of a Punjab based private educational institution. The Educational Promotion Society of India (ESPI) described the decision as “whimsical”.

AICTE chairman SS Mantha termed the argument of private institutions as “frivolous”. “These institutions spent so much on granite flooring and air-conditioning but cannot spent money on procuring world class e-journals which would ensure quality in technical education,” he told HT.

Several studies on pass-outs from technical educational institutes have found them to be of poor quality. A NASSCOM-McKinsey study of 2005 had found only 10 % of engineering graduates to be employable.

The AICTE in the last few years had tried to improve quality and prescribed buying of printed journals. This year the council decided for online journals considering their better access and regular up-gradation.

The e-journals prescribed by AICTE are also subscribed by Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management, country’s premier higher education institutions. “These journals help students to remain updated on what’s happening in their respective fields around the world,” an IIT director said.

Mantha also negated the claim that it will increase costs for students saying that the private institutions charge a hefty library fees from students but fail to provide access to high quality reading material. The council has negotiated price with these e-journal publishers and the institutions would be getting them as a discounted price, he said.

The private institutes are also furious as AICTE did not consult them before issuing a direction in this regard. “The stakeholders in such a decision, namely the institutes and the faculty affected, have not been consulted,” Harivansh Chaturvedi, alternate president of ESPI said, in a letter to HRD minister Kapil Sibal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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