Technical panel says HRD Ministry is recognising sub-standard colleges

According to the AICTE — which grants recognition to technical and education institutions and business schools, and works under the aegis of HRD Ministry — around 700 business schools and technical colleges have been given recognition in less than two months’ time.

disgruntled AICTE officials claim that the speed at which these institutes –with not much reputation to back them — have been getting recognition is quite unprecedented. Almost all set norms have been flouted in the process.

Naturally, this has raised quite a few eyebrows in technical education circles. The AICTE officials have, of course, passed the buck on the HRD Ministry officials, saying: “We are being pressurised by Ministry officials to ignore established rules. We have only been giving out the accreditation under the Ministry’s directions.”

Requesting anonymity, the officials took potshots at the Ministry and its bureaucrats, claiming that “a few private business houses wanting to get into the lucrative higher education market and those with saffron leanings have been favoured” in the “hurry-up operation”.

Of course, wholesale accreditation is being doled out in the name of spreading on computer education and also for increasing the country’s share in qualified management personnel.

However, AICTE officials are not ready to buy the argument. “On one hand they want to speed up the process and on the other, they ask us to space out the cases to ensure that it does not raise eyebrows,” said one official.

This is reportedly what has led to tension between AICTE and HRD Ministry officials. “Later, if questions are raised, we are the ones who have to face the music,” another AICTE official said.

However, HRD Ministry officials denied there was any such problem and claimed instead that the Council was governed by rigid archaic norms which sometimes holds up projects unnecessarily. But the problems, if any, lie with the state governments, they said. As the institutes come under state jurisdiction, and the Centre cannot turn down their request.

“The constraints come from the state governments as well, leading to unequal concentration of technical institutes,” a HRD Ministry spokesperson said, citing Bihar as an example.

But the AICTE is upset that the HRD Ministry has overturned their decision in several cases. “Even when they do not conform to our guidelines, the cases are sent back to us with the Ministry’s approval,” a senior AICTE official revealed.

The Council has an appellate system by which any private technical education institute which has been denied recognition/accreditation can put in an appeal. But the appellate authority is a HRD Ministry official. Hence the clash.

While the HRD Ministry feels that the AICTE lacks flexibility and picks unnecessary holes in applications, leading to inordinate delays, the AICTE thinks it is being undermined and smells a rat.

“They (the HRD officials) are breaking rules with the Minister’s (Murli Manohar Joshi) consent,” AICTE officials assert. And the HRD Ministry argues it is private money which is running technical education in this country and “they do need a little elbow room”.