Thursday, September 14, 2006

AICTE


The council—the nodal body to approve all institutions offering management courses and responsible for monitoring their quality—has no teeth to regulate the mushrooming of unsavoury management institutes. Some of the better institutes consider it an obstacle rather than one creating a healthy environment for B-schools. Finally, rampant corruption and lack of expertise render the AICTE incapable of monitoring.

From this Outlook story. Consider:

... Despite having the second largest number of schools in the world after the US, majority of Indian B-schools lack quality curriculum, faculty and facilities. Many act as mere placement agencies.

All one needs to start a school is less than 1.5 acre land, 20,000 sq ft of built-up area, 20 computers, seven faculty members, 2,000 books and subscription to 30 journals. There are many licensed institutes whose infrastructure and faculty exist only on paper. Although approved, these institutes don’t even try for an AICTE accreditation. Anyway, an AICTE accreditation is voluntary.

* * *

The latest issue of Outlook also carries this year's ranking of India's B-schools. In its dead-tree version, on the scond page of this cover story, Outlook carried an 'article' about Amity's B-school claiming that it's ranked No. 1 among 'private' B-schools. It turns out that the 'article' was actually an ad placed by Amity, and shamelessly accepted by Outlook, which has now been forced to issue this clarification.

4 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    No comments.

  2. ommachi said...

    I know how this works, when the last time I did a stripping of their survey of engg. schools; I actually bought the mag. and read through it...and learnt about those strategically placed adverts as well...

    this time I am not wasting my money anymore. Thanks for the warning, although I don't need it in judging these guys...

    On the other hand, a disturbing thing I observed the last time I did some questioning about their survey at my blog is, not all of the concerned people in academia could swallow the logic of the post; some went about justifying blindly the survey, personally to me (without giving a single reason against any of my reasoning)!!!!

    I was amazed at the gullibility of the educated lot; i am no more surprised why these survey works always...

    Then I realized, there are people in academia itself (the supposed educated lot), who deliberately want to delude themselves of their reality, for some sort of ego-boost and chest beating.

    My conclusion: don't underestimate the power of delusion. When it runs a country like the USA, why not such trifles...

    I will leave it at that here, a public forum; may be in person I can relate to you more.

  3. Cosmic Voices said...

    the annual surveys are actually assured sources of advertising revenues. the fact that we have terms like "advertorial" shows how brazen the nexus between editorial and advertising has become.

    p.s: i seem to have some problem in posting comments ever since you upgraded. I get messages like this " HTTP method POST is not supported by this URL. Error 405"

    is it just me?

  4. Unknown said...

    Abi,
    Amity does the dirty trick also in NDTV. The bottom scroller bar where the ad appears, there is also a logo of the organisation that sponsors it. The logo for Amity is a text image that says "EDUNEWS". With this kind of shady ways to get into the stream, I wonder what kind of teaching goes on there.
    -Phani