Technical institutes to no longer remain under AICTE from 2014

Students in technical educational institutions across India will soon be able to get their grievances redressed through the university their institute is affiliated to, instead of trudging all the way to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) centres.

Updated on: Nov 9, 2013, 20:03:57 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Students in technical educational institutions across India will soon be able to get their grievances redressed through the university their institute is affiliated to, instead of trudging all the way to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) centres.

As per the recent Supreme Court order debarring the AICTE from regulating technical educational institutions, the government is finalising new norms that will empower universities to regulate around 10,000 institutes in the country.

Under the new regulations, all technical institutes need to be affiliated to UGC-recognised universities.

The regulations empower universities to grant recognition to the institutions based on the academic and infrastructure norms set up by the University Grants Commission (UGC).

Based on the infrastructure, the university will allow the courses to be run and the intake in each course for an academic year. The university will also have powers to review the curriculum of the institutes and prescribe fees.

“We will shift from government regulation to self-regulation, wherein the institutions would have to declare in a public domain as to what they are offering,” said a senior government official, who did not want to be named.

“The universities will also look into the complaints against the institutes made by students or any other stakeholders.”

So far, students with complaints had to approach either the four regional AICTE centres or its headquarters in Delhi.

Once the new rules become operational from the next academic year (2014-15), technical institutions will not need to seek approval from the AICTE every year. Instead, they will have to get their infrastructure revalidated once in three years.

The UGC, which is formalising the new regulations, will not interact with individual institutes as the AICTE used to do. Instead, the universities will have to submit an affidavit to the commission on the number of institutes recognised, courses allowed and the intake of students.

If any action has to be taken against a malpractice, it would be routed through the university, officials said.

The government is also looking at providing central funds to well-performing private technical institutes through the universities in a bid to create centres of excellence in the private sector.

A scheme in this regard called Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan was recently approved by the Union cabinet.

The changes in regulations have taken place as the Supreme Court said only the UGC was empowered to regulate higher education institutions in India and not the AICTE.

The AICTE was set up in 1945 as a national-level advisory body. It was given statutory status in 1987 by an Act of Parliament for regulating and developing technical education in the country.

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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