New Delhi: Against the backdrop of the death of three UPSC aspirants due to flooding at a coaching institute in Delhi’s Old Rajinder Nagar, a Parliamentary Committee has found that in the name of preparing students for various examinations, coaching centres have become centres for minting money by luring gullible students.
The committee in its latest report further stated that such coaching centres lure aspirants into their trap and subject them to undue pressure for best performance. “Many a time, students unable to cope with pressure go into depression and resort to extreme steps,” the committee chaired by Dr M Thambidurai said in its report.
With regard to the issue of students' suicides, Prof TG Sitharam, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), said that AICTE has recognised emotional and social well-being of students as essential parametre for approval of educational institutions by AICTE from 2023.
“Universal human values have now become part of the curriculum. Induction programme has now become mandatory in all engineering institutions where students are taught how to manage their emotional and social well-being because they are under a lot of pressure. These guidelines were given to all institutions and have been integrated into the approval process,” said Dr Sitharam.
Moreover, AICTE has also moved to non-cognitive skills and made vocational as well as skill part of the approval process. Students are given credit and these are transferable. “AICTE also has the largest internship portal in the world with more than 2.5 crore verified registered students with 75,000 companies,” Dr Sitharam said.
The committee observed that one of the reasons for rapid industrial and economic development of economic powerhouses, like the USA and China, is that they made high quality investment in education, training their people and promoting research and innovation.
The committee, therefore, felt that India also needs to develop a well-coordinated and robust system of imparting vocational training and skill development to students to spread prosperity and contribute towards economic development.
The Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee Thambidurai observed that in the pretext of pursuing National Education Policy (NEP 2020), many educational institutions are disproportionately admitting students, even beyond the prescribed limit, to various courses run by them and no action has been taken by the UGC against such institutions.
“This has given rise to the monopoly of the education ecosystem by some big educational institutions, as such big institutions admit students in large numbers into various courses offered by them, while smaller institutions struggle to find students to fill vacant seats for courses run by them. Due to this, infrastructure set up and resources mobilised by such smaller institutions remain idle which amounts to sheer wastage of national assets created by them,” he said.
Thambidurai further said that such discriminatory treatment may not only force smaller institutions run by various well-meaning Societies and Trusts to close down, but also discourage opening up of new educational institutions and defeat the whole purpose of revamping our educational system as envisaged in NEP, 2020.
The committee opined that the UGC should take stern action against big educational institutions indulging in such monopolistic practices so that there is no discrimination between big or small educational institutions as all the institutions operate only after due approval from the statutory bodies concerned like AICTE and others.
The committee observed that this is against the practice followed by other similar statutory bodies, like NMC, UGC and State Governments, which allow such security deposits to be held in joint accounts of the Trusts and Societies operating such institutions and the statutory bodies concerned.
“Such practice would discourage growth of new educational institutions as they will find it unviable to operate among other big educational institutions. Security deposit may be created in the joint name of AICTE and Trust, Society and kept with Trust and Society and interest accumulated on the deposit may be allowed to be retained and used or spent by the Trusts and Societies concerned operating such institutions for providing scholarships, financial assistance to the students and for infrastructural development of the institutes as envisioned by NEP 2020,” the committee stated.
