The regulator of business schools in India, the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) has donned on a friendlier hat in recent months, but has also strengthened the grip on its constituency. "The approach is to be transparent but firm," says Dr R.A. Yadav, vice-chairman of AICTE.

AICTE's makeover from a staid old dyed-in-the-wool regulator, also believed to be reeking with corruption from bottom to top, began with initiatives taken by a feisty lady ias officer, Anuradha Gupta, who introduced a series of steps to achieve transparency, including the use of cameras in the campus during the annual "inspection tour" of the AICTE committee. Ironically, the idea was not so much to showcase the achievements of the institute but to make sure that the institute does not change anything that has been captured in the video after the team had left the premises. AICTE justifies its use of video technology to put an end to the sordid drama masquerading faculty, makeshift classrooms, rented library books and furniture among other things.

The new team, Damodar Acharya and Prof Yadav, AICTE's chairman and vice-chairman respectively, have traditionally been acerbic critics of the way higher education is treated in the country. Now that the boot is on the other leg, the quality conscious duo is trying to infuse quality and accountability in higher education. The result, AICTE derecognised for the first time in many years more than 38,000 seats in 98 engineering and management institutes citing various deficiencies, like inadequate faculty. The council had done a quick study on nearly 4,000 institutions to uncover gaps, and gave them time to correct these after which they promptly cut the number of seats and courses on offer.

The council also stirred a hornet's nest when it derecognised the Delhi-based Amity Business School, citing gross violations of AICTE norms in terms of student admissions and number of courses run. For the first time the council also redistributed Amity's students to other AICTE-approved schools.

Steps towards transparency

The AICTE has gone ahead with its zest for transparency, first by sealing all access to the AICTE offices by any director, once again an irony to focus its energies on the task at hand instead of dealing with a myriad group of favour seekers from b-schools who used to park themselves at the ip stadium, where AICTE offices are located.

Even as it cut back seats, the council reopened permissions for new mba seats, a decision that had been put on hold for almost a decade. "The idea is to provide high quality mba seats. The norms of entry to newcomers are strict and the process more transparent than ever," explains Yadav. The b-school bosses have for long argued that demand for an mba education is high in the country and it can make do with three or four times the present capacity, except that quality should be high. In fact, the mushrooming of "autonomous mba institutions" clearly shows that demand for management education continues unsatiated.

The council has thus tightened norms on deposits, land use pattern, infrastructure provision, faculty quality and on the background of b-schools promoters. "The system of providing a letter of intent that expects the institute to complete its infrastructure provision on the ground costs in crores, and may prove highly risky for new aspirants," points out an intending b-school promoter from East India, who has applied for council approval.

New courses, colleges being registered

AICTE has on its scanner a new and improved procedure for inspection of compliance norms of schools, a better accreditation procedure, and a new policy for faculty development programmes in business schools amng others.

Industry experts who have a greater stake in the b-school process as the source of supply of their executive human resource welcome the AICTE moves with relief, considering the haphazard growth of b-schools vitiating quality in recent years. "Any move towards ensuring high quality executive human resource is welcome," explains P. Dwarkanath, president of the nhrd network.

"The regulator's job is to suggest changes and ensure its compliance not through diktat but counseling," Yadav acknowledges. The AICTE Act is like the rbi Act when it comes to scope and effectiveness, he points out. In other words b-schools better watch out for the AICTE whip.