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The process currently being insisted on by AICTE for affiliation for MBA or Post Graduate Diploma in Management is archaic, irrelevant, ineffective, and an artifact of the License Raj. AICTE could well be a case study to demonstrate how noble
intensions of public systems lead to ignoble consequences, the costs of which are borne by the country as a whole for generations. And, AICTE lives off tax-payers money!

The most important determinants of the quality of post graduate business education are the comprehensiveness and the contemporariness of curriculum, and the rigour with which the students are sensitized to the curriculum. These determinants are, in turn, fulfilled only by a top quality faculty comprising academics as well as practising professionals. Only such a portfolio faculty model helps the rapid incorporation of the latest techniques and thoughts, thereby, keeping the teaching at the cutting-edge, besides, of course, providing the fundamentals of the art and the science of management.

Whether a new business school is sited on its own land, or the reception office has to have such minimum size, or the capacity of the electrical generator is so much, or the faculty should be recruited through advertisements, or the Society which promotes the school has so much balance in the bank, and other such norms stipulated by AICTE are laughable and banal.

The manner in which AICTE implements the process designed by it while giving approval for new business schools is of dubious value is clear when we compare the quality of the faculty and, therefore, the quality of the graduates passing out of AICTE-approved business schools, with that of those independent schools which elected to offer top-rated business education without AICTE approval.

It could be seen that many of the schools in the private, self-financed sector, without AICTE approval could offer better placements with superior companies than those which are part of the university scheme or in the private sector, both with AICTE approval. A more damning evidence to demonstrate the essential futility of the elaborate process of AICTE approval is hard to come by.

The recruiters are no more bothered to check whether a given business school has AICTE approval or not. All that is relevant to them is the quality of the students, the curriculum and the faculty. There is an incredibly huge systemic failure here. How is that AICTE even today doesn't realise that the recruiters of business graduates don't care a damn about its approval? Don't they have any kind of system to collect and process information so vital to what they do?

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* Contributed by: -
V. S. M. Nair is a management professional with over 35 years of experience across several institutions in the country. He has had some exposure to the process of selection of management graduates as well as management education in the country.