The Margdarshan Scheme has been made available to all AICTE-approved, federally supported institutions nationwide by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). The AICTE-funded programme has been started for 330 Mentee Beneficiary Institutions (MBI) and 33 Margdarshan Institutes.
The Margdarshan institutes or mentor institutes are those that are centrally supported and include IITs, NITs, IISc, and IISERs. In addition, a number of additional Margdarshan institutes from across the nation will be chosen based on their years of operation, National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings, accreditation status, availability of sponsored research projects, number of national and international conferences they have hosted, availability of industry-sponsored labs among them, and availability of IPR cell.
Only Mentee Beneficiary Institutes (MBI) that have received AICTE approval will receive mentorship. Mentor Institutes will grant Mentee Beneficiary Institutes access to their resources, including their libraries, innovation and incubation cells, and intellectual property rights (IPR) cells. To help the recipient institutes achieve NIRF rankings and NBA/NAAC certification, Margdarshan institutions will also offer advice and support.
Speaking to Education Times, TG Sitharam, chairman, AICTE, says, “Margdarshan initiative has been introduced by AICTE for enabling unaccredited technical institutions to get recognition. These institutes will get to learn about the AICTE initiatives and will receive guidance and support for achieving good NIRF ranking, NBA/NAAC accreditation.”
This will be done through a variety of activities such as training workshops, mentoring, research and innovation activities. “The chief coordinator of the Margdarshan institution will identify appropriate resource persons for mentoring MBIs. Mentoring will focus on providing MBIs with awareness of outcome-based education, promotion of innovation and research culture, continuous feedback mechanisms for improvement and documentation of all academic processes,” added Sitharam.
Margdarshan institutes will also use MBIs to carry out Faculty Development workshops (FDPs), expert talks, workshops on universal human values, programmes for career guidance, and introduction courses. “This will qualitatively improve the nation’s technical education’s overall quality. Additionally, remote institutions that lack accreditation may access mentoring from a nearby Margdarshan Institute that is 200 km away,” adds Sitharam.
“Each Margdarshan institute can mentor 10 Margdarshan Beneficiary Institutes (MBIs), who will thereafter receive better NIRF rankings and NBA/NAAC accreditation, according to Abhay Jere, vice-chairman of the AICTE. This plan will establish a mentoring culture in engineering institutions and build an excellent educational environment.”
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Source: TOI
