Tech schools land in trouble

Professional education institutions could be in trouble if the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) has its way.

Published on: Mar 16, 2006, 13:54:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, Mumbai

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Professional education institutions could be in trouble if the All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) has its way. These institutes might have to shut shop or slash courses as the new AICTE norms stipulate that no technical education institute can operate in the country without the council's nod and land of its own.

"It was felt that the new guidelines were necessary to introduce quality technical education and recommendations were made by experts," said AICTE vice-chairperson RA Yadav. Procuring land for the institutes has also become costlier as urban development authorities like the DDA in Delhi and the BMC in Mumbai do not allocate land at concessional (institutional) rates. Land is now auctioned at market rates.

The AICTE, on its part, says it has tried to tackle the problem for institutes in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata by relaxing land requirement norms. For engineering colleges, the minimum requirement is three acres. In case of a management or a pharmacy programme, it is 0.5 acre. "We are also allowing for vertical growth in the built-up area for additional intake of students to take care of land constraints in cities," Yadav said.

The AICTE rules say institutes with a shortfall of more than 50 per cent of the stipulated built-up area will have to wind up operations. Those institutes operating from temporary sites have been asked to shift to permanent sites by March-end or close from 2006-07 academic year. "Students will be accommodated in AICTE-approved institutes nearby," an official said.

The institutes have asked the AICTE to do away with the clause on owning land and are now seeking affiliation on the basis of the quality of education being offered, facilities and faculty strength.

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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