Professor Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe, Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), delivered the Distinguished Lecture at the International Management Institute (IMI), Kolkata on July 14th, 2018 at Dr R P Goenka Auditorium, IMI Kolkata, Alipore Campus. One of the foremost scholars of the country, Professor Sahasrabudhe spoke on “Leadership and Autonomy in Educational Institutes Can Create Wonders”
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IMI-Kolkata established in 2010, has carved out a definite road to success in a short span of 8 years since its inception. The institute’s flagship two-year full time PGDM programme is NBA accredited. It has also been accorded equivalence with the Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree by Association of Indian Universities (AIU), effective from July 2016. This Institute also offers an AICTE approved full-time Fellowship Programme in Management (FPM).
Professor Anil Sahasrabudhe spoke on the importance of holistic development of a student, not merely academic curricula, but whole lot of co-curricular and extracurricular activities, life skills and a set of communication skills like reading, writing, speaking and listening.
He mentioned “Leadership is a very important facet in educational institute.” He also cited “the examples of Punjab University and Indian Institute of Science, to some extent BHU, which are more than 100 years old, but have maintained the status as excellent institutes amongst top universities in India.”
Professor Anil Sahasrabudhe spoke on the persistent challenges in granting autonomy. Some of the challenges are college faculty and staff not being interested and opposing autonomy due to unknown and unfound fears of increased workload, losing jobs etc. There are instances where management of the institute is unwilling to seek autonomy because autonomy brings accountability and management sometimes finds it easy to operate under the brand value of university rather than creating its own brand. There are also instances, wherein university does not grant autonomy because university does not want to let go of a prized institution from its possession.
Professor Anil Sahasrabudhe stressed on the benefits of autonomy which include “designing one’s own curriculum, number of credits, types of courses, mandatory generic core, discipline core, discipline electives and open electives. The curriculum can also have flexibility to make internships mandatory, industry interaction, mini projects and main projects, socially relevant projects.”
He also spoke of schemes of Union Government like Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, Skill India, Start up India, Swachha Bharat, Digital India, Smart cities which value student’s role in the curriculum.
According to Professor Anil Sahasrabudhe autonomy opens doors for selecting faculty of their choice, teaching learning experiments, designing new ways of accreditation system which is outcome based, foreign collaborations for student and faculty exchange. He summarized the outcome saying, “Such institutes can easily be able to get cycle of accreditation effortlessly since all policies are aligned for achieving outcomes based on the institute’s own vision, mission and set of goals.”
The Distinguished Lecture series of IMI-Kolkata has seen lectures delivered by distinguished speakers like Professor Kar-yiu Wong, Padmavibhushan Raghunath Anant Mashelkar, former Director General of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research(CSIR), Mr. Sumit Bose IAS, Secretary to Govt.of India (Revenue), Lieutenant General Ashok Kumar Choudhary, AVSM, SM, VSM General Officer Commanding Bengal Area, Prof. Kaushik Basu, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, World Bank and renowned author Gurcharan Das over the last few years.
Professor Anil Sahasrabudhe, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Guwahati joined All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) as Chairman on 17th July 2015. In his career span of 31 years, he has held several important Academic, Research and Administrative positions and is presently working as Chairman & Expert Member on various National Level Committees. Some of these include Chairman, Basic Scientific Research (BSR), Empowered Committee of UGC, SWAYAM Board and Chairman BOG of NIT Itanagar.
Director, IMI-Kolkata. Prof Arindam Banik, quoted” There are excellent private business schools in India. They can also contribute significantly in order to implement appropriate education policy. This will reduce issues, such as problem of employable population and poverty.”
