Enrolment numbers for PGDM students: AICTE’s bid to control admissions fraud
AICTE plans to allot unique Enrollment numbers to every Post Graduate
Diploma in Management (PGDM/PGPM/PGDBM, etc) student in every approved Indian
business school and put them on its website in a bid to streamline MBA
admissions. Think of it as a Unique Identification Number project for all MBA
students in AICTE-approved b-schools of
As a way of regulating quality of education, the All Indian Council for
Technical Education (AICTE) controls the number of approved PGDM seats in every
complying b-school. But in the vast landscape of privately-controlled
management institutions in
This is how the racket operates. Let’s say, a b-school has 60 seats approved
by AICTE. Using that as a marketing-pitch, the b-school will admit many more
than 60 students and accommodate them in batches that are named PGDM, but are
affiliated to local universities or distance-education universities such as
How would AICTE’s enrollment numbers help? If you are a PGDM student and your name does not feature on the AICTE website under your b-school’s enrollment numbers, then you have clearly been fooled by your b-school. AICTE on its part will smell a rat whenever a b-school submits a list of students more than its approved limit. No b-school will of course, send such a list. But this move will put pressure on private b-schools to get their act together.
Observe the AICTE notification below, especially the grey box at the bottom. While the idea is a smart one, it relies completely on the student’s initiative to verify the existence of his enrollment number in order to be an effective system. So if enough PGDM students across the thousands of AICTE approved b-schools in small towns and cities do not know about this initiative, they will never check for their name on the AICTE website and that will allow b-schools to continue their racket scot-free. I am hoping that very soon, AICTE will run large eye-catching advertisements in newspapers to inform PGDM students of their role in this initiative.
Added Later: The Director of a Private Business Institute,
who does not wish to be named told us that this initiative was taken by AICTE
last year too, however, in practice very few institutes sent the names of the
students of their PGDM program to AICTE. After July’s cleanup of the corrupt
AICTE top-brass and a more promising Human Resource Development Minister (Kapil
Sibal) at the helm, we expect better results.
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