The fate of India's budding engineers lies in the hands of the few inhabitants of the AICTE building in South Delhi colony. It's sparsely populated, heavily bureaucratic, and as one senior professor puts it, thin on "education theorists or engineering experts thinking about what the nation really needs". The All India Council for Technical Education—one of India's apex higher education regulators—is inside its own Kafkaesque bubble. Made into a statutory body by an act of government in 1987, AICTE has enviable control over all aspects of technical institutes in India. From fee caps and curriculum to more quotidian matters like limiting junk food in canteens. Its days are numbered though. A bigger, all-consuming body called the Higher Education Council of India or HECI threatens to subsume AICTE's full panel of controls. But that's not all the new regulator will take. If some of the structural issues of AICTE—its centralisation, its lack of innovation and its tight chokehold over colleges—aren't nipped, HECI will struggle. The idea, is to aim for more autonomy for technical institutes. But if HECI adopts the same "licence-raj" mentality as its predecessor, all the gains of this regulatory upheaval will be in vain. What's at stake and why should you care? Of India's million engineering graduates, at last count, only 55% are employable. In the past six years, the AICTE has had to close over 550 colleges, issuing a ban on opening new ones till 2024. AICTE has already missed the boat on the IT boom, say senior professors. It's definitely not a curve that HECI can allow to plummet further.
