AICTE breather for DU colleges seeking nod for B.Tech courses

In a breather for 27 DU colleges who have been seeking AICTE nod for running B.Tech courses, the regulator has agreed to take a fresh view of the case.
"It was agreed at a meeting between Delhi University and AICTE officials that AICTE will take a lenient view and examine the case from a fresh perspective," highly-placed sources said.
"AICTE is likely to conduct a fresh inspection of the colleges and consider it as a special case," they added.
In a fresh twist to the stand-off between DU VC and the HRD Ministry over the introduction of FYUP, AICTE had last week asked the colleges to submit an affidavit within "six hours" through which they were asked to promise that they would address the shortcomings of faculty and infrastructure within the next six months.

The principals found the deadline to be "impractical" and, as a result, only about six colleges are understood to have submitted the same.
"After the six-hour deadline passed, DU had approached AICTE explaining the difficulties in adhering to the directive. The varsity was assured that non-submission of the affidavit would not impact the procedure of granting the nod in this case," sources said.

B.Tech programmes in Computer Science, Electronics, Food Technology, Instrumentation Electronics and Polymer Science were launched as part of the Four-Year Undergraduate Programme (FYUP), which was last year scrapped following UGC intervention.
UGC had, however, directed DU to continue with these five B.Tech programmes only for the benefit of the over 6,000 students admitted in the academic year 2013-2014.

The colleges were asked to seek approval from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex advisory body regulating technical education in the country.
With several deadlines lapsing over the months, students had raised concerns over non-approval of the courses with HRD Minister Smriti Irani in February this year who, in turn, had directed the VC to do the needful.
The direction for the filing of the affidavit came after an inspection of these colleges by AICTE.
"Non-submission of affidavit by the stipulated time will be taken to mean that your college is not interested and approval will not be granted to your institute," read the communication sent to the colleges by AICTE.