Selecting an educational institute for your child could become a considerably easier task. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will soon start grading institutes on the basis of quality of education and infrastructure, something on the lines of what is done in the developed world.
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The National Board for Accreditation — an autonomous body under the AICTE — has submitted a report recommending grading of education institutions as a whole rather than just grading the courses (the present format of AICTE), a move confirmed by AICTE vice-chairperson RA Yadav.
The board was asked to study the present accreditation system of AICTE and recommend some elementary changes. One can gauge the slowness of the accreditation system from that fact that courses in 500 institutions are being given accreditation out of a total of 9,000 under the council's regulation.
AICTE officials, however, blame the eligibility criteria for the slow progress. Only those courses that run successfully for two batches are eligible for accreditation. Thus, for a management course, it is four years and over six years for engineering.
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"We started accreditation in 1996 and only a few institutes have become eligible. Accreditation is voluntary and therefore, not many institutes have come forward," explained a senior AICTE official.
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"We started accreditation in 1996 and only a few institutes have become eligible. Accreditation is voluntary and therefore, not many institutes have come forward," explained a senior AICTE official.
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The board has suggested major changes in the entire process and called for grading institutes A, B, C or D within a few years of affiliation. It says there should be different levels of facilities, fee structure and quality of education for each category, so that a student knows what an A category institute or a C category institute offers. "It will make admissions much more transparent," an official commented.
Though gradation will remain voluntary, officials point out that an attempt should be made to encourage grading for institutes. The AICTE could, for instance, offer incentives like more courses and increase in student intake and make it an eligibility criterion for seeking benefits under different scholarship schemes.
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The AICTE’s plan falls in the line of the Planning Commission’s recommendations for the 11th five-year plan, which say all educational institutes should be graded. The Commission also suggests that grading agencies in government and in private sector be made responsible if something goes wrong with the assured quality of the institute.
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.
