The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will file a review petition in the Supreme Court next week on the apex court’s order allowing private colleges to conduct MBA and MCA courses without AICTE’s permission.
In their order yesterday, judges B S Chauhan and V Gopala Gowda ruled that though MCA was a technical course, the AICTE couldn’t lay down the standards.
The court order said, “An MBA course is not a technical course within the definition of the AICTE Act”, and "an approval from the AICTE is not required for obtaining permission and running an MBA course by the appellant colleges."
The judges said the role of AICTE is advisory, which means it can prescribe uniform standards of education in affiliated members of a university by sending a note to the University Grants Commission.
“We will file a review petition on this. After all these years, something that is being done cannot suddenly become wrong. We do not want damage to the students. There could be tremendous amount of exploitation and unstructured growth. We do not want that to happen," said Shankar S Mantha, chairman, AICTE.
The Association of Management of Private Colleges and a few private colleges in Tamil Nadu, the appellants in the case, argued the AICTE Act being an enactment of Parliament could not be amended in year 2000 without being placed in the Parliament.
The court accepted this argument.
Mantha said management is a programme which is listed under the Act. “They have taken recourse to some technicality that some document was not placed in the Parliament at some point in time. Now that cannot be a reason for saying that management is not a technical course,” he added.
The judgment, said industry players, could be a blow to the AICTE, which made it mandatory for colleges running MBA/MCA courses affiliated to any university to seek its prior permission. It could also lead to further proliferation of MBA/MCA institutions.
