AICTE chief for automatic autonomy to educational institutions

Institutions with a standard level of accreditation should be given autonomy automatically, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Chairman Anil D. Sahasrabudhe said on Saturday.

"When any institution which gets accredited with a level which is beyond a threshold, they should be given autonomy automatically, whether the faculties or the institutions or the University want it or not. I think that is the way forward.

"In our country, to become autonomous there is still a long process involved. There are instances where institutions are interested in autonomy but the staffs and faculties are not because they feel the workload will increase," Sahasrabudhe said while addressing a session 'Millennial Learning Educational Strategies for the Gen Next' organised by Bengal Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

"These are all mindset problems," he said.

With autonomy in place, they have a lot of freedom in order to make their own curriculum, practice the way they want to teach and there are a lot of other advantages, he said.

Referring to the Kaw Committee Report on Technical Education, he said India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are the only four countries that are still following the affiliation system and rest all other countries have autonomous colleges.

According to him, recently, the government has added three more parameters - affordability, autonomy and self-declaration or accountability. Stringent measures will be taken against those institutions that are not following what they have declared, he added.

He also said the council has developed an 8-module programme for mandatory certification of teachers before they come into the teaching profession in technical colleges.

"It is a crucial certification programme, including how you revise a syllabus, set the question papers and how you interact with the students, etc.," he said.

Sahasrabudhe also said the centre would conduct "Hard Hackathons" in some centres in which students would be given tasks to come up with "exciting and interesting" ideas for addressing real life problems like water and energy and this hardware hackathons would probably be held in June.

"Probably, we will have 11 centres. In each centre, students will face with a unique problem or challenge for tackling problems ranging from water, energy and others... the centres will be confirmed soon," he told reporters here.

The initiative will be the first such programme on hardware after hosting of Smart India Hackathon to offer digital and sustainable solutions to real life problems faced by the country.

--IANS

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