GUEST COLUMN
Onkar Singh
To coordinate the development of technical education in India, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) was set up in 1945. Since the pre-independence era, this acted as a national advisory body for coordinating and promoting technical education, overcoming regional imbalances, standardising technical education, etc. till the AICTE Act 1987 came into force and transformed AICTE into a regulating body for technical education. Undoubtedly, in the last 80 years, the impact of having a separate regulating body has been evident in the compliance-centric technical institutions offering various diploma, graduation, and post-graduation programmes under the AICTE’s ambit. However, the poor employability of technical professionals and complacency in ensuring the quality of educational outcomes in technical education have been concerning factors.
Compared to other regulators in medicine, pharmacy and legal education—who have exclusive authority over enrolment and licensing of respective professionals to practice, thereby controlling educational outcomes—AICTE lacks the power to enrol or license technical professionals for practice and thus has no control over the final educational outcome. Eventually, due to the absence of any regulator for technical professionals, the higher education institutions offering technical education are free from ensuring the worthiness of their graduating technical professionals. It is an opportune time to contemplate regulating the quality of professional engineers and licensing them to work by setting up a statutory body for professional engineers in the country, like other professional regulators.
Indisputably, AICTE endeavours to establish checks and balances upon the programmes run with its approval. But, the AICTE’s shift from physical inspection due to various reasons in the past decades to the proforma-based approval process has weakened its regulatory oversight and led to the dilution of teaching-learning activities at ground zero.
AICTE has no regulatory control over the technical education programmes run in universities / deemed universities. As a result, there has been a massive capacity enhancement of technical education programmes in such universities / deemed universities. As per AISHE data, the number of universities / deemed universities is 614 in the private sector and 613 in the public sector.
Presently, despite technical education operating under distinct programme-specific norms and standards laid down by AICTE, the ongoing thought to set up an apex single regulatory body by subsuming the regulatory functions of the All India Council for Technical Education, the National Council for Teacher Education and the Council of Architecture could be another blow. Notably, however, the Council of Architecture is permitted to retain its statutory privilege of enrolling architects under the Architect Act, 1972.
There appears to be an uneven approach to regulating different disciplines, while protecting some professions and not others. Discussions are abuzz as to why the medical and allied health education, dental education, legal education, nursing education, pharmacy education, veterinary education, etc. have been excluded while the overall aim of single regulator is to enable and empower the universities and other higher educational institutions to achieve excellence in multidisciplinary teaching, learning, research and innovation, through co-ordination and determination of standards in institutions for higher education or research and scientific and technical institutions.
NEP 2020 perspective
From a holistic higher education perspective, as envisaged by NEP 2020, the apparent exclusion of certain programmes may limit the role of the single regulating body to facilitate the universities and other higher educational institutions to actually become independent self-governing institutions for promoting excellence in multidisciplinary education through a robust and transparent system of accreditation and autonomy. Thus, bringing the technical education at par with the broad higher education domains of liberal arts, sciences, and teacher education under a single regulatory framework, while leaving medicine, law, and other regulated professions to continue under their respective statutory councils, may ignore distinct nature of technical education and must be revisited in light of the NEP 2020 mandate. As the NEP also directs that the preparation of professionals must centrally involve critical and interdisciplinary thinking, discussion, debate, research and innovation, for which the professional education should not take place in the isolation of one’s speciality.
Further, the NEP 2020 delineates that, in view of professional education being an integral part of the overall higher education system, the stand-alone agricultural universities, legal universities, health science universities, technical universities and stand-alone institutions in other fields shall aim to become multidisciplinary institutions offering holistic and multidisciplinary education. It also calls upon all institutions offering either professional or general education to aim to organically evolve into institutions/clusters offering both seamlessly and in an integrated manner by 2030. Without going into the detailed prescription for various streams of professional education in NEP 2020, a cue must be had from the past as to why the separate regulators for every discipline of professional education came up and continue to date. An introspection concludes that the nature and requirements of managing different disciplines, such as agriculture, veterinary, healthcare, legal, pharmacy, technical education, etc., have not been similar, and the one-size-fits-all model was not considered suitable, which culminated in discipline-centric regulators.
Multidisciplinary education
Undoubtedly, in the present time, there is a demand for fostering closer collaborations between industry and higher education institutions to push innovation and research. Alongside, the way technology is advancing because of its utility to professionals from all streams, the influence of technology is likely to integrate technical education with other disciplines of education. Just to name a few, the growing penetration of technology in the disciplines of professional education is evinced from, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data, Data Science, 3-D Manufacturing, Nanotechnology, Neuroscience, Robotics, Micro-electro Mechanical Systems, Radiology, IoT, Virtual Courts, Digital Legal analytics, Remote sensing, Precision farming, Genetics, Genomic studies, Biotechnology, Veterinary diagnostics, etc. which are transforming respective discipline of professional education.
This reiterates that the intermingling of various disciplines of higher education will help in realising the present needs of inclusivity of disciplines through technological interventions. Under these circumstances, if the dismantling of the existing higher education framework is on the anvil, then a thought must be given to bringing complete higher education under one regulator for better coordination and multidisciplinary growth, else make corrections to transform the existing regulators based on the learnings from their functional imperfections. Also, for ameliorating the quality of technical education, a statutory regulatory body for registering professional engineers to grant recognition could help as a top-down approach.
(The author is former vice chancellor of Veer Madho Singh Bhandari Uttarakhand Technical University, Dehradun; views expressed are personal)
