For the first time, Anna University in Chennai is conducting affiliation process completely through online. The university has developed web application 'Affiliation Monitoring System' for this and started accepting applications from existing colleges from Tuesday.
The university has fixed January 5 as the last date for submitting the application for existing colleges seeking affiliation for both existing as well as additional courses of BE, BTech, BArch, ME, MTech, March, MBA and MCA programmes to be offered in 2019-20 academic year. Colleges can admit students in the 2019-20 academic year, only after getting the affiliation from the university, which will be completed by May 15.
The university has also asked engineering colleges which have got permanent affiliation for the courses offered by them to submit the detail in the web application, so as to keep a record of the course details. For the past couple of years, the All India Council for Technical Education has been following the online processing of applications for engineering colleges seeking approval.
Welcoming the move, TD Esawaramoorthy, secretary of the All India Federation of Self Financing Institutions said, "The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has introduced online processing of approval application a few years ago, which has made the process easier for private college managements. We have to change faculty details and library books details and there will not be major changes in the details like the land, laboratory. So the application process was easy."
"Now, the Anna University has also moved to e-governance and introduced online processing of affiliation application. This will help private colleges. Earlier, Anna University used to ask for particular details again and again once every six months. With the online processing this will be removed, as the university will have all the details in its computers," he added.
He also requested the Directorate of Technical Education also to move to an online system of processing admission details, so that it will help the private college managements. Meanwhile, the AICTE, which was supposed to have started the approval process for the coming academic year, is yet to initiate the process.
Last year, AICTE released the approval process handbook on December 15 and received the application from college between January 1 and 31. But, this year, approval process handbook was yet to be released.
"This year, the AICTE is likely to introduce lots of changes in the approval process handbook. The AICTE has sent those changes to the Ministry of Human Resource Development and awaiting its clearance. The AICTE has convened a meeting of its regional officers at Delhi on Monday. The approval process handbook is likely to be released in the first week of January and AICTE will receive application till the mid of February," sources said.
