Prof S S Mantha has been appointed as Chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). He was the acting Chairman of AICTE since August 2009. Under his leadership he would like to see AICTE facilitating and providing an enabling mechanism to make India one stop destination for Technical Education in five years from now. S S Mantha, Chairman, AICTE shared his vision of taking AICTE into new heights with Pragya Gupta of digitalLEARNING…

AICTE is one of the foremost e-Governance projects in the country. It is in effect a content and knowledge management portal. The Portal www.aicte-india.org was launched for the public on 7th January 2010. The web portal is a unique experiment to bring in some of the best practices of business and computing into a live application thereby providing utmost transparency and accountability.

The portal is developed on ORACLE-SIEBEL CRM platform. It provides important information through an easily accessible website. The AICTE website also has the facility for conducting intranet transactions for the AICTE internal workflow applications. It also allows internet transactions for the stake holders to access the live database for making online applications for setting up new institutions. It also allows AICTE to monitor and regulate the existing institutions online. Business Intelligence tools (BI) allow various statistics and MIS reports to be generated for efficient decision making.

A research portal will be available shortly to promote research culture amongst the students, faculty and industry. Students can apply for loans / scholarships online. Eventually all processes will be online and every transaction will be processed and tracked online.

The e-governance effort will provide a unique ID to all the students, faculty and the institutions so that the tracking, grievance address and all interactive functions can be facilitated for the growth of technical education in the country.

AICTE is also actively engaged in the skills development, which is an extremely important activity for a growing economy such as ours. Every student who goes through higher education will be well served if he or she has additional skills acquired along with his / her studies. It enhances the employability opportunities. On the other hand skills acquired for a student who does not go through a formal education will provide a means of self employment and also a chance for employment in the formal sector. Focussed skill development, with employability as the maxim is the need of the day.

AICTE this year has also allowed institutions to be set up in a PPP mode to enhance participation by two very important players, who are engaged in mobilising economic growth.

Viable models for growth of higher education need to be explored if we are to come out of the low GER syndrome. AICTE allows credible foreign players to enter into collaborations for setting up good technical education programmes with local partners.