Like Rip Van Winkle, after being in deep slumber for more than half a century, mandarins of the Union human resource development (HRD) ministry, Planning Commission and PMO (prime minister’s office) have suddenly woken up to the socio-economic value of vocational education and training (VET). Mysteriously, the fact that almost every plumber, carp-enter, motor mechanic and electrician who serviced them for the past 50 years was an unqualified individual with slapdash on-the-job peer training even as 60-85 percent youth in the US, Germany, UK, South Korea and China were routinely getting VET certification, escaped the attention of post-independence India’s omni-scient Planning Commission which thus far has drawn up 12 detailed five-year plans running into millions of printed pages.
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However suddenly in 2006, following persistent complaints from India Inc about the fast-track Indian economy experien-cing a grave shortage of skilled shopfloor personnel, on Independence Day (August 15), prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh announced a major national drive to disseminate and upgrade VET. A few months later, a high-powered task force was constituted to draw up a roadmap for the national rollout of VET. The task force inter alia recommended promotion of 1,500 government-run industrial training institutes (ITIs) and 50,000 skills development centres by 2012. It also recommended establish-ment of a National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) in the public-private partnership model with representative organisations of industry (FICCI, Assocham, CII etc) and the Union government to fund entrepren-eurs willing to promote VET institutions countrywide. The target: to skill and certify 550 million youth by the year 2020.
That this time round government and industry are serious about establishing a VET infrastructure countrywide, was confirmed on March 18 when address-ing the annual global conclave of the news weekly India Today, the prime minister announced that “within two months the country will embark on a skills development revolution which will touch the geographical length and breadth of the nation”. Although he didn’t elaborate, academics at the conclave interpreted this remark as a reference to a National Vocational Education Qualification Framework (NVEQF) which is being prepared by a group of state education ministers, and will be finalised by a Union HRD ministry-convened co-ordination comm-ittee by July 31. The core mandate of the state-level group of ministers and coordination committee is to draw up a contemporary VET framework offering guidelines and suggestions which will satisfy India Inc.
“While syllabuses and standards will be set by sectoral skills councils, NVEQF will set the guidelines for equivalence of mainstream education and VET to enable integration and mobility,” says Dilip Chenoy, chief executive officer of NSDC.
Adds Hari Menon, chief executive of India Skills, a VET joint venture between the Manipal Education Group and City and Guilds, Britain’s largest provider of work-related assessments and vocat-ional qualifications: “The core issue is the legitimacy of vocational education. Currently the credibility of VET certification available is low and there’s hardly any difference between those with certification and those without it as far as industry is concerned. There-fore the time has come to define job roles, build curriculums and instructions and frame exit gates so that vocational education gains legitimacy and acceptance. Hopefully NVEQF will provide useful guidelines to VET providers.”
With government and industry now serious about building a nationwide VET infrastructure, which will offer over 100 million children who drop out of school before they complete class VIII, a sec-ond chance, there’s also the prospect of India Inc experiencing a shopfloor productivity boost in the medium future. Yet it remains a conundrum why it took so long for the Planning Commission, Indian academia and society to discover the obvious virtues of vocational education and training.
Autar Nehru (Delhi)
Last hurrah
The managements of the country’s 545 privately promoted independent (‘unaided’) business management schools breathed a collective sigh of relief on March 17 after the Supreme Court issued a stay order against a notification of the Delhi-based All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), which tightened the council’s control over them.
At the fag end of last year, on December 28, AICTE issued an eight-point notification to all B-schools countrywide under which it outlawed several B-school entrance exams including the Xavier Admission Test (of XLRI, Jamshedpur), ATMA (administered by the Association of Indian Management Schools) and MICAT (of the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad). The AICTE notification also mandated that tuition fees charged by B-schools should have the approval of the fee fixation committees of state govern-ments; that all postgraduate diploma programmes offered should be of 24 months duration and that they should follow the council’s model curriculum. Aggrieved by AICTE’s blatant attempt to “put the clock back” and tighten — rather than loosen — its control over private unaided B-schools, the Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS) and the Education Promotion Society of India (EPSI) among others, challenged AICTE’s notification prompting the apex court to issue the March 17 stay order.
The Supreme Court’s stay order is a big relief for B-schools which were preparing to admit students under their own entrance exams such as XAT and ATMA rather than CAT (Common Admission Test) of the IIMs or state government-conducted exams such as CET (Common Entrance Test). According to them the AICTE notification has completely disregarded the Supreme Court’s judgements in the T.M.A. Pai Foundation (2002) and P.A. Inamdar (2005) cases, upholding the fundamental right of private unaided institutions of professional education to devise their own admission processes subject to their being merit-based and transparent under Article 30(1) of the Constitution of India, as also to determine their tuition fees subject to their being reasonable.
“The notification is particularly shocking because AICTE itself is in a shambles. In particular it has no comp-etence to regulate B-schools because not even one member of its board is a management expert. In fact it’s hardly a secret that AICTE has outlived its purpose with the National Knowledge Commission and the Yash Pal Committee having recommended its abolition. Therefore its attempt to set the curriculum and fees of B-schools is ludicrous, and the Supreme Court stay order confirms that. I am confident this interim stay order will be made permanent,” says Dr. Prabir Pal, director of the Regional College of Management (Autonomous), Bhubaneswar (Orissa) and incumbent president of AIMS.
Likewise, academics in Delhi express surprise that AICTE which has been wracked with scandals — its previous chairman R.A. Yadav was sacked in 2009 for corruption — and has hitherto recklessly recognised and accredited over 1,000 B-schools during the past five years, has ventured to expand its supervisory role. “The original sin of AICTE was to sanction and approve so many B-schools, the majority of whom are substandard. Now instead of targeting substandard institutions, it wants to use its own corruption and negligence as an excuse to extend its control over all private unaided B-schools. AICTE was established to regulate and supervise engineering education, it has no competence to regulate B-schools,” says Premchand Palety, promoter-director of the Delhi-based market research agency C fore which conducts annual surveys of the country’s best B-schools for Outlook and Mint.
With AICTE (and UGC) likely to be subsumed within the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) in the near future as per recommendations of the Yash Pal Committee, its sudden burst of activism is widely being dismissed as the death-throes of a discredited institution whose time has come. Quite obviously the learned judges of the apex court think so too.
Payal Mahajan (Gurgaon)