AICTE: A Dragon to be Slayed,
If Business Education in India is to be Saved
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The process currently being
insisted on by AICTE for affiliation for MBA or Post Graduate Diploma in
Management is archaic, irrelevant, ineffective, and an artifact of the License
Raj. AICTE could well be a case study to demonstrate how noble
intensions of public systems lead to ignoble consequences, the costs of which
are borne by the country as a whole for generations. And, AICTE lives off
tax-payers money!
The most important determinants
of the quality of post graduate business education are the comprehensiveness and
the contemporariness of curriculum, and the rigour with which the students are
sensitized to the curriculum. These determinants are, in turn, fulfilled only by
a top quality faculty comprising academics as well as practising professionals.
Only such a portfolio faculty model helps the rapid incorporation of the latest
techniques and thoughts, thereby, keeping the teaching at the cutting-edge,
besides, of course, providing the fundamentals of the art and the science of
management.
Whether a new business school is
sited on its own land, or the reception office has to have such minimum size, or
the capacity of the electrical generator is so much, or the faculty should be
recruited through advertisements, or the Society which promotes the school has
so much balance in the bank, and other such norms stipulated by AICTE are
laughable and banal.
The manner in which AICTE
implements the process designed by it while giving approval for new business
schools is of dubious value is clear when we compare the quality of the faculty
and, therefore, the quality of the graduates passing out of AICTE-approved
business schools, with that of those independent schools which elected to offer
top-rated business education without AICTE approval.
It could be seen that many of the
schools in the private, self-financed sector, without AICTE approval could offer
better placements with superior companies than those which are part of the
university scheme or in the private sector, both with AICTE approval. A more
damning evidence to demonstrate the essential futility of the elaborate process
of AICTE approval is hard to come by.
The recruiters are no more
bothered to check whether a given business school has AICTE approval or not. All
that is relevant to them is the quality of the students, the curriculum and the
faculty. There is an incredibly huge systemic failure here. How is that AICTE
even today doesn't realise that the recruiters of business graduates don't care
a damn about its approval? Don't they have any kind of system to collect and
process information so vital to what they do?
