Top B-school, but AICTE won’t see it

The India School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad is not an institution recognised by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the regulatory body for technical education, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Feb 1, 2008, 02:57:11 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The India School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, ranked among the top 20 business schools in the world by the Financial Times is not an institution recognised by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the regulatory body for technical education.

ISB is the only B-school from India to be ever ranked among top 20. The AICTE’s disregard of its ranking hasn’t had any impact on the School’s standing among the students and the business community. In fact, ISB’s faculty members claim that the standards they follow are higher than those prescribed by the regulatory council. “We have nothing against AICTE. We have always tried to maintain the best global standards,” said R. Rammohana Rao, Dean, ISB.

Repeated attempt to contact acting AICTE chairman R.A. Yadav to elicit his views on the issue were to no avail.

ISB's high ranking is a proof that the Council's system of approvals focused more on regulation than on ensuring quality education, conceded an official of the HRD ministry. He said the ISB case has given the ministry a concrete reason to go into the AICTE's functioning and the standards it has laid down. "Very soon we will review the functioning of both AICTE and the University Grants Commission," a top official told HT.

ISB started about six years ago with the help of the corporate sector and did not bother to seek approval from the AICTE. For ISB, it meant lack of government recognition of its alumini. "But ISB passouts got impressive placements in MNCs with pay packets of over Rs one crore," the official said.

The ISB also has another first to its credit: collaborate with three foreign institutions -- Kellogg School of Management, The Wharton School and the London Business School without AICTE's permission.

There are about 80 institutions in India teaching with the help of foreign collaborators without the Council's approval. For its part, the AICTE has cleared only three tie-ups with foreign universities. An AICTE official confirmed that applications of another 80 for signing MoUs with foreign institutions were pending with the council.

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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