FROM the number of students that an institution can admit to the number of rooms that it must have, education regulators specify every aspect of the education process.
Take the regulatory process of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), for instance. It has over 67 different parameters incorporating standards that an institution must meet in order to be approved. But barring the insistence on the number of contact hours, AICTE has hardly any measure to ensure a good learning experience for the student. No discussion on transparency in the admission process, none on quality of teaching, no way for the student to objectively assess his or her experience and seek remedy for being treated unfairly or getting cheated.
The student has always felt cheated. Nearly 67 percent of the queries that Careers360 receives are about bad experiences of the students, which, in turn, is the result of bad regulatory regimes. A lack of application of mind in designing regulations, indifference to the impact of haphazard rulings on students, pious but useless sentiments about student welfare, and a colonial mindset of controls, all has resulted in a regulatory quagmire that is difficult to escape from.