Creating the best and brightest

A November 2005 ruling by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) summarily mandates, among other things, that no technical course can be started or even renewed without its prior approval. On the surface the AICTE’s notification makes sense. However, there are at least two problems with the AICTE as it exists. First, it supervises technical and management programmes alone. This inherent restriction leaves out a number of professional programmes, such as mass communication. There is no mechanism to regulate these programmes in a similar way. As a result there has been a spurt in such programmes across the country, many of which are lacking in basic resources, infrastructure and faculty.

Second, the AICTE does not supervise non-affiliated programmes (ie, non-university ones). The government must clearly distinguish between a university affiliation and quality control. If the government decides to give more teeth for quality control to universities, that decision would be welcome so long as universities are provided with standardised criteria, resources and the information to do so. Ideally, however, a centralised committee such as the AICTE has proved more effective in going beyond mountains of cumbersome paperwork and in translating to institutions the vision for compliance and even initiative.

But at a deeper level the government requires to radically rethink the existence of AICTE. The AICTE places too much importance on input as opposed to output. We need a regulator that can standardise and control quality, because we need institutions to be effective in delivering professionals. What we need, therefore, is a regulatory-accrediting commission that can take care of a broader set of institutions as well as a broader set of criteria. Infrastructure and resources alone are not enough: many AICTE-compliant institutions do not deliver as effectively as they are expected to. Last week the Planning Commission recommended establishment of a grading authority that would categorise institutions on the basis of what they offer on a variety of criteria, rather than continue with compliance with threshold criteria that institutions must meet. The Commission hopes to bring the issue up at an appropriate time with the government.

The government needs to proactively mandate a system for all, not just affiliated or aided institutions. A combination of ensuring compliance and monitoring application of professed concepts and norms is the answer. The combination would ensure that minimum standards are followed, but not in a way that seals the approval with compliance of those standards alone. The method of ‘due diligence’ inspects and approves existing standards and methods, typically for an inter-organisational collaboration. Applied to education for its compatibility with agreed educational goals, this process of validation would entail assessing how effectively an institution is translating its own professed philosophies. The key question that a regulatory authority must ask is: how is the institution able to deliver quality professionals stemming from these policies? The onus is then on individual institutions to present the requisite evidence.

In a liberalised marketplace education is business (big business, mostly!). Delivery of education must therefore be treated on par with delivery of products and services, with regulatory mechanisms like those for other industries. The products are the professionals institutions churn out, and in order to control their quality, it is necessary to control the quality of input (learning methods, quality of faculty, resources, and infrastructure).

The sooner our government and its regulatory agencies recognise that education can be delivered in a professional way, the better it will be for a country in search of world-class professionals.

The writer heads the Indira School of Communication, Pune

shashidhar_c_n@rediffmail.com