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Good Institutions Must Get More Autonomy, Bad Ones Should Wind Up
Careers 360
|April 2017
Prof. Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, AICTE minces no words when he speaks to B. Mahesh Sarma on what needs to be done to put engineering education back on track….
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Q. As a regulator, how do you view India’s engineering education in terms of its achievements and challenges?
A. In terms of different types of challenges, one of the biggest challenges was to have more Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER), more people to get opportunities, what we call as access and equity. To a great extent, access and equity have been achieved. Now, the main challenge pertains to quality. You must realize that we have such a large number of institutions in our country. Are all of them really delivering quality? We’ve found a large number of them doing well, some are certainly doing very poor, and some are on the borderline. So, we need to have a graded approach.
Institutions that are performing really well should be given more autonomy and we should influence them to do even better. The ones that are on the borderline, should be given a helping hand and also mentorship so that they also cross the barrier and become good institutions and then there are those twenty to twenty-five percent institutes which are not doing well and over the years are not able to succeed. Such institutions should probably wind up.
Q. What are your plans as far as promoting those that are doing well are concerned?
A. Couple of initiatives have already started taking movement in that direction. One of them is mandatory accreditation where all colleges have to get accredited by NBA which is in the outcome-based format, unlike in the past which was looking at the inputs like buildings, classrooms and a number of laboratories. AICTE is supporting autonomy and accreditation. So, if everyone starts planning on having their own mission, vision and strategy and start putting in efforts in that direction, quality will naturally improve and this should be reflected in getting good accreditation by these colleges.
This story is from the April 2017 edition of Careers 360.
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