Govt may restore AICTE's powers

The council lost relevance after Supreme Court allowed private colleges to conduct MBA and MCA courses without its permission

The New Year is expected to bring some cheer for the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the country's technical education regulator as the HRD ministry is expected to amend the AICTE act which could help restore its powers.

“We are bringing an act to restore the relevance of AICTE. We are currently working on it and we are hoping to get it approved soon. We had planned an ordinance, but we do not think we will go ahead with that”, Pallam Raju,Union Minister for Human Resources development told Business Standard,

The Supreme Court had in April this year allowed private colleges to conduct MBA and MCA courses without AICTE’s permission, thereby rendering AICTE defunct. In their order, Judges B S Chauhan and V Gopala Gowda ruled that though MCA was a technical course and AICTE couldn’t lay down the standards, an MBA course is not a technical course within the definition of the AICTE Act, and AICTE’s approval was not required for obtaining permission and running an MBA course by the appellant colleges.

Following the order, AICTE was only expected to play an advisory role allowing it only to prescribe uniform standards of education in affiliated members of a university. AICTE filed a review petition against the order informing that the authority played the role of the regulator for as many years and it cannot suddenly become wrong.

"We do not want damage to the students. There could be tremendous amount of exploitation and unstructured growth. We do not want that to happen," Shankar S Mantha, chairman, AICTE had said. The review petition was later dismissed by the Supreme Court.

Following the order the HRD ministry was looking at a proposal to amend AICTE act through the ordinance route. Before the Supreme Court struck down its power, AICTE had made it mandatory for 3,858 management institutes (with 3.7 lakh seats) and 1,937 MCA colleges (with 1.9 lakh seats) across the country to seek its approval for the courses.

The Association of Management of Private Colleges and a few private colleges in Tamil Nadu, the appellants in the case, argued the AICTE Act being an enactment of Parliament could not be amended in year 2000 without being placed in the Parliament.

Meanwhile, a senior official at the HRD ministry said that any amendments to the act will take a long time before it is finalized. “There have been some talks about bringing a bill to amend the AICTE act. If it comes through, it will be the AICTE bill 2014, but we are still working on it and it will take time before the parliament approves it”, the official added.

AICTE, which had once been synonymous with corruption, has of late been advocating transparency and accountability. Set up in 1945 as a national-level advisory body, AICTE was given statutory status in 1987 by an Act of Parliament for regulating and developing technical education in the country.

The regulator is also now looking to provide vocational education in schools from the next year after the HRD ministry asked the regulator to provide a plan to ensure that school drop outs are reduced.