AICTE norms violation: colleges in Telangana at a loss to explain ‘shared’ faculty

Allegations the handiwork of rival groups’

In the midst of barren lands in a remote village in Nalgonda district of Telangana, the small building is the only concrete structure around. There is hardly any movement of students or faculty in the building to reflect that it is an educational institution. The silence around it is punctured occasionally by the rural youngsters riding bikes to reach their villages.

The Adusumilli Vijaya College of Engineering in Maisireddypalli village in Bommlaramaram Mandal and the Adusumilli Vijaya Institute of Technology and Research Centre share 15 faculty members, as per the data from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), extracted and analysed by the public data website ‘Factly’. These were among the 174 colleges recently denied permission by the Telangana government to admit students for lack of faculty and infrastructure.

Zero admissions

The college had zero admissions in the last three years, but it has managed to attract a group of students from Kerala in the management quota for the Petroleum Engineering course. “We have facilities and faculty required for the course,” is all that the director of the college, who refused to identify himself, told The Hindu by way of explanation.

In West Godavari district of neighbouring Andhra Pradesh, the 100-acre Sri Vishnu Educational Society campus at Bhimavaram has an exclusive community FM radio station and concrete structures, and students and faculty members praise the facilities. Yet Sri Vishnu Institute of Technology and Smt. B. Seetha Polytechnic College run by the society share 17 faculty members, as per the data. Generally, M. Tech students pursuing correspondence courses conduct classes for polytechnic students, society’s director D. Suryanarayana explained. After completing the M. Tech course, they are employed by the Vishnu Institute of Technology to conduct lab sessions and summer classes. “Out of negligence,” the polytechnic college staff could have failed to update the list of such faculty members and continue to list them to be on their rolls, Mr. Suryanarayana said.

In Kanyakumari district of Tamil Nadu, the KNSK College of Engineering at Therekalputhoor and NSK Polytechnic College at Chenbagaramanpudur, which would appear to share 11 teachers, are nine km apart. K. Thanappan, chairman of the Vellalar Trust that runs the two institutions, besides an Industrial Technical Institute, claims that it is a false allegation aimed at maligning the name of the trust. He said it might be the handiwork of rival groups within the trust.

Official data from eight major States shows that over 90 per cent of engineering colleges have at least one teacher whose name also features on the rolls of another college, and there are at least 50,000 such ‘duplicate’ teachers.