Govt to amend AICTE Act

To restore the powers of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the government is planning an amendment to the AICTE Act.

"We are bringing an Act to restore the relevance of AICTE. Currently, we are working on it and hope to get it approved soon. We had planned an Ordinance, but we do not think we will go ahead with that," Minister for Human Resource Development Pallam Raju told Business Standard.

In April, the Supreme Court allowed private colleges to conduct master's in business administration (MBA) and master's in computer applications (MCA) programmes without AICTE's permission. Following the order, AICTE was only expected to play an advisory role and prescribe uniform standards of education for affiliated members of a university.

AICTE had filed a review petition against the order, saying the authority had played the role of a regulator for many years and it couldn't suddenly become wrong. "We do not want damage to students. There could be tremendous amount of exploitation and unstructured growth. We do not want that to happen," AICTE Chairman Shankar S Mantha had said.