New Delhi, February 09: Several top private business schools in India have decided to petition high courts and the government against a contentious new rule by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the nation’s apex regulating body for technical education.
The institutes that will fie the petition include Xavier Labor Research Institute (XLRI) in Jamshedpur, Birla Institute of Management Technology (BIMTECH), the Management Development Institute and S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai among others. These institutes had met on Monday to finalize the strategy for opposition of the new rule.
The private b-schools are opposed against a notification by the AICTE that had been received on December 28, 2010 that prevented private b-schools from conducting their own admission tests for the postgraduate diplomas in management.
The private b-schools have alleged that the implementation of the new rule could dwindle the quality of management education in India.
According to the notification by the AICTE, individual institutions have also been barred from conducting their own group discussions (GD) and personal interviews (PI). Instead, the states have been directed to conduct the GDs and PIs, which are part of the second phase of the procedure for admission into b-schools.
The AICTE had come up with the new rule in order to make the admission procedure into b-schools easier for MBA aspirants by reducing the number of admission tests they have to take and also minimize the amount of traveling that students are required to do for the GDs and PIs of individual b-schools. The AICTE had said that the new rule would also help in elimination of any malpractices that b-schools may have utilized for admissions.
However, the rule has not been welcomed by b-schools and they have argued that the rule kills their autonomy in admissions and would in turn lead to a decline in the quality of education at top private b-schools.
BIMTEECH Director H. Chaturvedi has said that the new rule would kill the growth of management education in India and take the nation back 20 years when we were yet to go global with education.
The institutes that have decided to petition against the rule have also garnered the support of Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) Director Bakul Dholakia. Dholakia had earlier challenged attempts by former human resource development minister Arjun Singh at impinging into the autonomy of the IIM.
–IANS