AICTE, the Regulator which doesn't share data!

Updated on 06 Jan 2014, 10:20 AM IST

WHEN we started our project of doing an objective ranking, one thing was clear: data is the key. And who else should be in a better position to provide the data than the body responsible for “Regulations and maintenance of Norms and Standards” of technical education in the country, i.e. AICTE, or so we thought.

Since we had a tough time scouting for Mandatory Disclosures (MDs) last time around, and the same are not there on AICTE website, we decided to take some inspiration from Arvind Kejriwal and filed an RTI with AICTE seeking Mandatory Disclosures, which the Engineering Colleges have to compulsorily file with AICTE for the approval.

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We looked up their website and sent the RTI to the person designated for RTIs. The RTI was returned to us saying it is not the right person and we should file it at the other office of AICTE! Even after re-filing the RTI, the response which we got was shocking. AICTE demanded Rs. 12.97 lakhs for furnishing the information, and that too just for one of the regional zones. We gave up. If AICTE is this messy can institutions be far behind?

Below, we chronicle the responses by AICTEto our queries (click on image to enlarge and read in detail):

Pay money or no data! One of the items we asked from AICTE was for copies of the mandatory disclosures that each institution must file with AICTE. This is available in electronic form and ideally must be available for free on the websites of all the colleges. The South Central Regional office thinks otherwise. They asked for Rs. 12.97 lakhs for the info. A neat way to stonewall any information seeker		Spot the officer game The RTI document on the AICTE website mentions Dr. Manish Bhalla as the Principal Information Officer. We file an RTI with him. AICTE after a month informs us the RTI request must actually be re-filed with Mr. Ghuge. AICTE is so lackadaisical that it changes the information officer, but does not bother to inform the public. And then goes on to return all further requests addressed to the PIO as incorrectly addressed. A very efficient way to deflect pesky info seekers, but we believe the practice is illegal.
			Passing the buck is our practice A response from the South-western regional office informs us officially citing a range of rules, that we must get the relevant information from the website of AICTE. But what the officer may not know is that the website of AICTE for the last two years sports the same message. Approval status page perpetually sports an “ Under construction” messsage. The letter also helpfully advises us to write to different State Department of technical education seeking data, forgetting the fact the organisation is mandated to act as the central coordinating agency for technical education and hence must be the prime source for any information .

There is nothing ‘Mandatory’ about Mandatory Disclosures

Having identified the top 500 + colleges in the country with the help of some leading IT recruiters, we embarked on the task of downloading the mandatory disclosures from the college websites. We were in for a merry-go-round. No college website, no link for Mandatory Disclosure, defunct links, corrupted files which do not open, we saw it all. A massive 82 colleges (more than one-sixth of the consideration set) had either missing or corrupt MDs, and we were considering the top 10% of the 3241 engineering colleges in the country.

The worst culprits in this respect were, of course, the prestigious IITs and NITs. The IITs, “Institutes of national importance”, consider themselves to be very much above the law which binds all other engineering colleges and consider it totally frivolous to upload Mandatory Disclosure: none can be found on the website of any of the 15 of them. Not only that, nobody can even determine how many seats are on offer by any of the IITs in any branch whatsoever. The data is simply not there anywhere.

The NITs are not far behind. Barring one or two, none of them have uploaded the MDs on their websites either. Fortunately, we were able to get the opening and closing ranks of AIEEE counselling from which all of them admit students. Interestingly the Ministry of HRD about a year back came up with a new scheme called Minimum Disclosure for all universities and other institutions. None of the IITs/NITs provide the same. The condition is quite similar when it comes to most deemed universities. Very few of them have complete information about the faculty, number of seats, application details or research programmes. Less said the better about faculty publications and students placements.

There is No Disclosure in Mandatory Disclosures

But that’s not all, even after downloading the MDs, we found missing data, (mostly about placements and admission cut-offs), no adherence to the stipulated format, reference to annexures which are simply not there etc. In short, every conceivable trick to obfuscate, hide and misrepresent data. It is very seldom that the data in the Mandatory Disclosure, data on the website pages and the data in admission/placement brochures match, clearly showing that the institute is lying at one place or the other. Many colleges/universities give the number of all the faculty of their university as that which is teaching the BTech/BE students full-time, while some give faculty details for only a few departments. At one place we found 119% as the figure given for percentage of students placed. Thus one could conclude that different colleges, in effect, leave no stone unturned to make a complete mockery of the data supplied.

The table below summarises the level of data available across different states as well as different modes for entrance examinations conducted for engineering admissions. If one looks at the table carefully, it is very clear that the national entrances like IIT-JEE and AIEEE are exceptionally transparent in the way colleges are selected. In fact AIEEE provides the complete cut-off status roundwise so that a candidate, depending upon his scores, can very easily judge the subject/college matrix with relative ease.

On the other hand one can also see that barring a few states, information is just not forthcoming about both the resources available in an institute as well as the kind of students it attracts. The admission cut-offs are most essential since they determine the kind of peer group one would work with. But very few states or institutes realise its importance and provide the same. And when AICTE, the supposed-to-be guardian, is busy in every other activity, other than directing and if necessary forcing institutions to be transparent who will prevent them from taking the students for a ride?

Level of data availability across states:

State/test	Data Status
ITT-JEE and AIEEE	Detailed cut- offs are available. But institutional data is extremely difficult to obtain. Even though all IITs are Institutions of National Importance none of them publish mandatory disclosure document.
Deemed Universities/ Private Universities	Most Deemed Universities conduct their own admission tests. So the relative merit of candidates who opt for them is impossible to assess. The institutes do not provide information on the number of students who opted for their exam, their scores, rank etc.
Andhra Pradesh	AP has the largest number of seats in engineering colleges and institutes in the country. The institutes come under the umbrella of the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education (APSCHE) which conducts the EAM-CET or Engineering, Agricultural and Medical Common Entrance Test usually coordinated by an institute of repute. Data is robust on student intake, participating institutions etc. However, individual institute's data is difficult to get.
Bihar	Conducted by Bihar Combined Entrance Competitive Examination Board, the examination, BCECE or Bihar CET, has been continuing in accordance with Bihar Combined Entrance Competitive Examination Act 1995. The information is very difficult to scout for even though the number of institutes is comparatively very few.
Chhattisgarh	Limited data is available for institutes admitting students to BE programme in various government/private/self-finance engineering institutions of Chhattisgarh. This is primarily possible through Pre-Engineering Test or PET. The intake usually is driven by the formula: 60 % through Chhattisgarh PET; 25% through AIEEE and 15% for management quota.
Delhi	No centralised Admission process. No common admission test. Each university has its own admission test. And no information is available on cut-offs.
Goa	The Directorate of Technical Education conducts the Goa Common Entrance Test (GCET) and most of the data can be collated from the DTE, Goa. Most of the data is available along with the marks and names of selected candidates.
Gujarat	Admission in Gujarat engineering Colleges is through the GUJ-CET or Gujarat Common Entrance Test conducted by the Admission Committee for Professional Courses (ACPC). From last year ACPC is conducting online counselling for seats. Thus relevant information is more or less available on the ACPC site.
Haryana	The admissions are done on the basis of Haryana State Counselling Society, making use of inter se merit of AIEEE. The other data was obtained from individual institutes as also on theadmissions.gov.in
Himachal Pradesh	Since the selections are done on merit of AIEEE marks and rank secured through a centralised counseling process conducted by Director Technical Education Himachal Pradesh (Sundernagar), the other information is garnered through contacting/visiting individual institutes personally or through their websites
Jammu & Kashmir	Jammu and Kashmir Board of Professional Entrance Examinations conducts entrance examination for admissions to engineering programmes in the state. The number of institutions to deal with is small and the Board does provide data on the results and also uploads the marks and names of selected candidates.
Jharkhand	The State CET (JCECE) is conducted by Jharkhand Combined Entrance Competitive Exam Board but even though limited institutions are there, information is extremely scarce. The website just gives out the list of ten institutes with their websites with information on discipline-wise student intake. There is no mention of 2010 results or cut-offs. Individual institutes websites barring few are also poor in giving data on cut-offs, admissions and faculty.
Karnataka	The CET or Karnataka Common Entrance Test conducted by the Karnataka Examination Authority gives access to approximately 54% of the seats. These are the government seats and usually vary from 50% to 100% of the intake in any course in any college. Further COMED-K, the “Consortium of Medical, Engineering and Dental Colleges of Karnataka” conducts a common entrance test to admit students in nearly 150 private engineering colleges in the state. Data is rather robust though it requires intelligent navigation skills to scout for the same.
Kerala	The KEAM (Kerala Engineering Agriculture Medical Degree) is conducted by the Commissioner for Entrance Exams, Government of Kerala. The data organisation for over 100 institutes in the state is quite systematic. But requires much improvement in terms of its richness.
Maharashtra	One of the most efficient websites is that of the Department of Technical Education. It offers detailed searchable database of cut-offs for institutions coming under its jurisdiction.
Madhya Pradesh	The process is governed by Professional Examination Board and the data is easy to get on admission procedure, intake etc., but getting cut-offs for all institutes in the state is a cumbersome task. The information is difficult to understand for people who do not know Hindi as the critical data set is only in Hindi and one has to look for other sources to validate the same information.
NE States	The data on engineering institutions in all the States of North East is extremely difficult to get. There are no dedicated sites such as the Directorate of Technical Education for these States. The individual colleges, barring a few, are also not concerned about uploading information such as the mandatory disclosure, not to talk about updating information. One has to scout for information in Annual Reports or documents of the individual institutes.
Orissa	The education board website has lot of useful information and is updated regularly. The admissions cut-offs of each of the participating institutions in the Joint Entrance Examination is available. This is a good source for all the relevant information on intake, admission updates, selection parameters and linkages to different institutes. However, there are individual institutes in the state that are reluctant to share much information. The planning body, however, does not do any further analysis.
Pondicherry	There are very few engineering colleges in the state and as such one has to look for data from the individual institutes which again are not very user friendly. Calling up the institutes also did not yield much result and one had to look for information from secondary sources.
Punjab	The CET Common Entrance Test conducted by Punjab Technical University gives access to approximately 76% of the seats in the region. The data is difficult to gather and collate.
Rajasthan	Admission to engineering colleges is through Rajasthan Pre Engineering Test followed by counselling. The data is available though in a segregated format, district-wise.
Tamil Nadu	The State is one of the few that has an organized and systematic way to scout for data, though sometimes it is quite tedious going through the same process. One has to be familiar with the State geography and also the affiliation status of an institute to access the data in a proper manner. The cut-offs for all the categories across all participating institutions are available. The qualifying examination is through Single Window Counseling by Anna University following merit and communal reservation in coordination with the Directorate of Technical Education in the state.
Uttar Pradesh	The admissions are largely through the State Entrance Examination (SEE) in the first year of the UG courses. UPTU normally conducts the exam. To ensure transparency in admission procedure, computerised result declaration of entrance examination and on-line-counselling at different places in the State has been mandated by the Technical Education Department of Government of Uttar Pradesh. The site has improved considerably over the last two years and one also gets to see the opening and closing ranks in different engineering colleges.
Uttarakhand	Students can gain admission to the Engineering Colleges in Uttarakhand through AIEEE conducted by CBSE. So there is no other way than to approach the individual institutes for other relevant information other than the AIEEE cut-offs which is available anyway on the AIEEE website.
West Bengal	The West Bengal Joint Entrance Examinations Board conducts JEM. Consolidated data on the results, cut-offs is difficult to get. The website is also not properly maintained. Individual institutes do not disclose the data on admission cut-offs, opening and closing ranks. It is a complex procedure to collate data on critical parameters from institutes.