‘AICTE biased when issuing orders’

Private unaided engineering colleges in the city and state have alleged that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is issuing biased orders due to political pressure. The college managements have alleged that colleges that are patronised by the party or its leaders are not facing any disciplinary action even though they had not complied with the infrastructure and academic norms for which they are penalised. The colleges have said that they will be filing a petition against this trend and also meeting human resource development minister Smriti Irani to apprise her of the AICTE’s ‘arbitrary actions’.

Last month, the AICTE issued a list of colleges that were refused Extension Of Approval (EOA) as well as reduced intake capacity of select engineering colleges, prompting the affected colleges to hold a bare-it-all press conference on Friday.

Advocate Appasaheb Desai, a member of Vasantdada Patil Pratishthan College of Engineering’s management, said, “There are around 367 engineering colleges in the state including government colleges too. All of them have some deficiencies with regards to infrastructure and academic compliance, but AICTE has taken action against only those colleges that the NGO Citizen Forum For Sanctity in Educational Institutions (CFSE) had complained about. Surprisingly, while the Forum had complained against 32 colleges, the EOA was refused to only 13 colleges that had incidentally taken AICTE to the Supreme Court on the same issue previously,” said Mr Desai, adding that such a move reeked of bias and ulterior motives of the forum that was based on political compulsion.

“The forum is headed by BJP MLA Sanjay Kelkar and it has members who work in colleges that also flout various AICTE norms. However, those colleges have been given the EOA, which goes to show that there is a concerted effort to victimise select colleges only,” said Mr Desai. He added that the affected colleges would be meeting Ms Irani and will apprise her of the arbitrary and discriminatory ways of AICTE next week.

Professor Vaibhav Narwade, secretary, CFSE, however rubbished the allegations and said that the college was resorting to maligning the forum and its members. “The college has been running without conforming to the norms since a long time. While AICTE’s move is appreciated the forum demands an inquiry on officials who abetted the deficient engineering colleges to offer courses and exploit students. We have already filed a petition in this regard in the Bombay high court,” he said.