Graded autonomy for top private engineering and B-schools
EQUALITY The move will provide certain amount of parity in status and a level playing field to the PGDM institutions
NEWDELHI: After granting autonomy to IIMs and top universities, the education regulators have now granted gradedautonomy to leading private engineering and B-Schools in the country that among other things shall be eligible for government grants and annual monitoring from regulators.
The All Indian Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has notified it decisions to categorise institutions into three categories based on their performance, excellence in domestic and international rankings and national accreditations.
Category-1 engineering and B-Schools shall be eligible for “grants and no inspections by the AICTE,” the new policy notification said.
“They can start new courses without approval; they may start skill courses; they open research parks, incubation centres or institute society linkage centres, provided it’s in “self-financing mode, either on its own or in partnership with private partners”.
Such engineering and management schools will be allowed to recruit foreign faculty and admit foreign students and decide on their salaries and fee independently. These institutions shall be “exempted from annual monitoring of their institutions… except when there is substantive evidence of their not meeting basic minimum criteria or of irregularities or malpractices”.
To get a category-1 status, for example, an institution must be running three courses and all of them must have got accreditation from the National Board of Accreditation with a score not less than 75% or 750 out of 1000 accreditation score. NBA accredits individual subjects in schools. If a school runs seven courses, at least five of them must have a score of 75% or above. Institutions who have a 67.5% score (upt0 75%), will be clubbed in the category-II institutions and rest will be category three. The first two category will also enjoy academic autonomy.
Other than the NBA score, if an engineering or B-School gets into the top 100 global subject rankings including the FT Global MBA Ranking or QS Global MBA Ranking will be considered for the grade one autonomy. “After IIMs autonomy, most of the private B-Schools were in disadvantage. This notification brings certain amount of parity in status and provide a level playing field to the PGDM institutions with IIMs to some extent,” said H. Charurvedi, director of Birla Institute of Management Technology (Bimtech) in Greater Noida, a leading private B-School. Other than Bimtech, hundreds of B-Schools including XLRI Jamshedpur, MDI Gurgaon, IMT Ghaziabad, Great Lakes Institutes in Chennai, Mudra Institute of Communication Ahmedabad (MICA), Goa Institute of Management, Fore School in New Delhi and RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group’s International Management Institute (IMI) in New Delhi are likely to benefit from the new notification from the coming academic year.
“It will also free the accredited institutions from red tapism, bureaucratic delays and archaic rules and help them to align their curriculum and programme bouquets with the ever-changing requirements of the Industry at national and global level,” said Chaturvedi, who is also the alternate president of the education promotion society of India, a confederation of private education providers.