Chairman of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) which regulates technical institution across the country Anil Sahasrabudhe believes that a regulator should not limit itself to inspection, it should also be a facilitator. In an interview with TOI, the head of the national-level apex advisory body talks about where engineering colleges are going wrong and why TN colleges are suffering
 

Q: AICTE is known to conduct surprise inspections. What were the major problems found during these inspections?

A major issue is fake names of faculty members on the list of colleges. Although we have relaxed the student-faculty ratio from 1:15 to 1:20, there have been institutions who don’t maintain the minimum ratios. Several of these colleges show a ratio of 1:30 or 1:50. Worse, the faculty register has names of people who are not employed by the institute. Last year, more than one lakh names of faculty members were weeded out across colleges after inspections. Now, we have started asking colleges for Aadhaar and PAN cards of teachers so that they cannot show inflated numbers. Another issue is that many of these colleges are not paying salaries of teachers as per the prescribed standard. 

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Q: Do we need a single accreditation body to regulate all institutions?

When it comes to technical institutions, we have only two – the National Board of Accreditation (for programme-based accreditation) and the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (institution-based accreditation). In the general scenario of education, having multiple agencies is not a bad idea as it may help in simultaneous accreditation of multiple institutions through different agencies given the large number of institutions we have in the country. What we need is a team of people who have integrity and can carry out the process fairly to prevent corruption in these processes.

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Q: With regard to architecture schools, the council of architecture and AICTE individually carry out inspections. Some schools have been complaining…

The two bodies should ideally carry out a joint inspection to make the process simpler. We have spoken about this with the council. They initially agreed but somehow it has not translated into practice. The only way forward would be through amendments to the AICTE Act; so that the apex body has full power to carry out inspections across architecture schools.