The Mashelkar Committee recommended upgradation of Regional Engineering…

Concept:

An upgradation in Indian higher education is a change of governance and status, not merely of name. When a review committee proposes upgrading a group of colleges, the substance of the proposal is who funds and controls them, how much academic and administrative autonomy they receive, and what degree-granting status they hold; the new designation is the label attached to that changed status. Answering such a question therefore means recalling which designation the committee attached to the new status it proposed.

Application to this question:

1. The body named in the stem is the High Powered Review Committee chaired by Dr. R. A. Mashelkar, then Director-General of the CSIR, constituted by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to review the working of the Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs).

2. Its 1998 report, “Strategic Road Map for Academic Excellence of Future RECs”, recommended that the RECs be taken over fully by the Central Government and upgraded into National Institutes of Technology (NITs).

3. The same report recommended Deemed University status for the upgraded institutions, together with full central funding and greater academic and administrative autonomy.

4. The recommendation was implemented from 2002 onwards, when the RECs were converted into NITs one by one; the National Institutes of Technology Act, 2007 subsequently gave the NITs a statutory footing and declared them Institutes of National Importance.

Cross-check against the other designations:

• “National Technical Institute” is not the nomenclature the committee proposed, and no institution of that name was created out of the Regional Engineering Colleges.

• “National Engineering Colleges” keeps the college designation, whereas the proposal was specifically to move the Regional Engineering Colleges from college status to institute status under central control.

• “National Technical Colleges” likewise keeps the college designation, and it is not a name under which any of the former Regional Engineering Colleges operate.

Result: the Mashelkar Committee recommended that the Regional Engineering Colleges be upgraded into National Institutes of Technology.