Here’s a story offering insights into how the seemingly inefficient practices of a regulatory body can affect the quality and price of education.

The lament of business schools and engineering colleges in the middle of every year is usually directed at the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) for not approving their courses, or approving a lesser number of seats than asked for. Allegations of inefficiency, over-regulation and corruption are flung at the regulator. AICTE defends itself by pointing out to the faculty and infrastructural deficiencies of the colleges which cannot support more seats than apportioned.

However, Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), a Greater Noida-based b-school is fighting a completely different battle. Since the last two years, it has been applying to the AICTE to reduce the number of approved seats in three of its courses and completely stop one course to which it has not conducted admissions since 8 years — all to no avail. Despite AICTE’s own Scrutiny Committee having given the go ahead to process the institute’s requests, the final list of approvals refuses to reflect the change. The school is planning to approach the Allahabad High Court to seek relief.

“We want to reduce the number of seats because we feel that we cannot sustain the quality of the courses at such high intakes. Besides that, we do not want to run the 3-year part time PGDM course anymore as the market for it has diminished long time ago. But AICTE has refused to approve this in both 2010 and 2011,” says BIMTECH’s Director Dr Harivansh Chaturvedi.

Besides stopping its 3-year Part Time PGDM for which it has not run since 2003, the school has been trying to get AICTE to allow it to reduce the intake for its 2-year PGDM Fulltime, PGDM (International Business), PGDM (Retail) and PGDM (Insurance Business Management) courses from 90 to 60 seats each. After reducing/stopping these courses, it wishes to start a PGDM in Sustainable Development Practices (SDP) with 60 seats, but AICTE isn’t granting them that approval either. For the school privately owned by the Birlas, it’s becoming a queer case of the AICTE dictating how many more (rather than less) seats the college must operate.

Not being allowed to reduce seats has been hurting the college in two ways. First, it forces the school to employ more faculty than necessary in order to adhere to AICTE’s faculty-to-approved-seats ratio of 1:15. “The 3-year Part Time MBA for which we have not admitted a single student since 2003, still forces us to employ 12 extra faculty members because of AICTE’s refusal to allow us to stop the course,” explains Dr Chaturvedi. This forces the school to admit more students than it believes it can deliver quality education to. It affects students because in such circumstances, the salaries of redundant faculty gets passed on into the fees. Second, the institute has spent over Rs 12 lakhs in processing fees with the AICTE in 2010 and 2011 for these ignored requests.

PaGaLGuY accessed AICTE’s Scrutiny Committee report dated 21 May 2011, which recommends that BIMTECH be granted reduction of seats in the three courses, closure of the part-time course and approval for the PGDM (SDP). Yet the final approval list released on September 5, 2011 contains no change in the number of seats at the college.

The AICTE documents provide further telling insights into seemingly random practices followed in the AICTE’s functioning. For example, the Scrutiny Committee report generated on May 21, 2011 shows the date of the Committee meeting as May 22, 2011, a full day later. Transcripts of communication between BIMTECH and AICTE are a saga of appeals pointing out to typing mistakes on AICTE’s part in incorrectly entering data such as the area of the school’s administrative office and the number of tutorial rooms. For example, after asking BIMTECH to specify the area of various parts of its administrative office area individually, the AICTE Scrutiny Committee report recorded the total administrative area as equal to only one of the parts (22 sq m) instead of their sum total, which was 218.54 sq m against the minimum requirement of 150 sq m. This was then concluded as a ‘deficiency’ leading to non-approval. Frustrated, the institute is planning to seek legal help to sort out the matter.

PaGaLGuY’s repeated attempts to contact AICTE Chairman Dr SS Mantha to seek the regulatory body’s version were not responded to.