The rules and regulations of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) are loaded with ambiguity and their compliance has become a cumbersome, tedious and humiliating routine. Such rules coupled with the integrity and competence of the AICTE staff are strangulating the growth of quality management education and encouraging the mushrooming of dubious institutions. Their rules are as archaic as - no two programmes can share the same building, staircase or toilets.
Centrally controlled and government financed college education has been a disaster for the country. Unfortunately, the education model that has been practiced since the British Raj - whose aim was to provide clerks and administrators for the state - has become too deeply entrenched for there to be a rational inquiry into alternative models for professional education in areas such as management. There are major drawbacks in such a system. Firstly, the professional competencies required to manage different type of sectors, domains and roles are not the same. A standardized curriculum is therefore severely counterproductive. Secondly, professional management has to serve the changing needs of the developing local and global environment. The freedom to innovate should thus be at the heart of all institutional management tasks. Our centralized system of education is oblivious to this. Healthy competition based on differential strategies should be the motivating force for developing a global quality educational system. Thirdly, government controlled resource allocation cannot provide for risky innovations, experimentation and research which are not easily quantifiable in terms of cost benefit analysis.
Flexibility, diversity, differentiation and innovation is the primary need of professional education in India. The centralized system on the other hand is precisely working in the opposite direction and this is becoming a severe tragedy for this country. As far as quality control is concerned, AICTE has failed. Most of the approved institutes of today do not fulfill as basic standards as permanent faculty members. Apparently, officials tip off certain b-schools on how to pass the council’s superficial inspection drill. As a result, a whole breed of entrepreneurs has sprung up in management education, who can only be described as mercenary.
There is a long waiting list for good b-schools that have applied for approval or accreditation. In 2003, AICTE announced that all institutes having foreign collaborations must seek approval. However, many who have applied for this accreditation have either got no response or have received arbitrary rejections.
Are accreditations completely obsolete in today's management education? I don't think so. It depends on the basis of accreditation. At present the only body for accrediting MBA in India is an arm of the AICTE. This is not a desirable situation. The accreditation agency should be an independent body with management and control held possibly by the b-schools themselves and supported by a panel of independent auditors.
The examples of AMBA in UK, EQUIS in EU and AACSB in the US are noteworthy. We should draw from them and create accreditation criteria and parameters based on the Indian context, business environment and economic needs.
Prof ML Shrikant is the Dean of Mumbai based SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. He is a DBA from Harvard Business School.