‘Colleges not serious about approval’

Blame game: While colleges blame AICTE, parents find fault with college principals for overlooking BTech students’ interests.

Delhi University (DU) colleges offering BTech courses still do not have clear answers on AICTE approvals. While representatives of some colleges say they don’t know if the university would seek approvals from AICTE or each college would have to make individual efforts, the principal of one DU college suggested it was best if the university approached AICTE for approvals for all colleges as “all problems then would be solved in one go.”

When HT Education spoke to former AICTE chairman SS Mantha, then still in office, he had said, “The University doesn’t come (to AICTE) for approval to run a technical course in an affiliated college. Each college will have to apply for approval and AICTE will consider each application separately. Till now, no college has made any application. They can apply online with the requisite documents for approval.”

AICTE, as a regulator for technical courses, did not know what DU colleges were teaching, the kind of infrastructure they had or whether they had the right faculty to teach these courses, Mantha had said.

Some DU colleges representatives, however, complained that they tried to get the approvals but could not fulfill some requirements for online applications. According to S K Garg, principal, Deen Dayal Upadhyay College, “First, the online application facility is for prior approval but we have already started these courses and want approvals in the middle of the session. Second, for online application, a college has to declare that it admits students through entrance exams, but all DU college admissions are on the basis of cut-off percentages. Third, colleges have admitted non-science background students for BTech in computer science.AICTE norms don’t allow non-science background in any BTech course. We cannot apply online because of these reasons.”

Avinash S Pant, AICTE’s chairman (acting) suggests that if Delhi University colleges are not able to apply online, they can meet in person our approval bureau which will generate a user Id and password for them.

“Once these colleges get user ids and passwords, the AICTE approval process and inspections of faculty and infrastructure will begin,” says Pant.

Some experts say that the provisions of Grants of Approvals for Technical Institutions Regulations 2010 of AICTE give it the power to relax approval processes.

“A very senior AICTE official has drawn my attention towards Regulation 2010 which says that the Council may in exceptional cases (for removal of hardship or other reasons to be recorded in writing) relax any of the provisions of these regulations in respect of any class or category of institutions,” suggests KK Khanna, a senior citizen, who has been running from pillar to post to seek help for a grandchild pursuing BTech course in a DU college.

Khanna has filed several RTIs with UGC, AICTE and MHRD, but has not received a straight reply about how the crisis is to be resolved.

“I wrote a letter to the prime minister and the president of India but nothing has happened till now,” he says.

The parent of another DU college student complains, “The problem is that DU colleges are not interested in making the extra effort to get AICTE approval because the issue concerns only one batch of students admitted in 2013 after which FYUP was scrapped. They don’t realise that the problem is jeopardizing the career of 6,000 bright students.”

Students and their parents also allege that colleges are completely unresponsive to their queries. .

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#DU colleges complain that they tried to get AICTE approvals but could not fulfil some requirements for online application
#Avinash S Pant, AICTE’s chairman (acting) suggests that colleges can meet AICTE’s approval bureau to get online approval issue resolved