 good afternoon. I am very thankful to Professor Deepak Patak for initially giving me a chance to meet you in this occasion. I will just give you a small presentation for about 15-20 minutes. Then we will have interaction as to how you can contribute or how you can be a part of the activities of ISTE. My name is Ari Haran. I am from Indian Society for Technical Education. I started my teaching career in Chennai. I was an assistant professor in engineering college in Chennai for 15 years and from the year 1999 I took over as the projects coordinator and development coordinator in ISTE and I am in Delhi working for various national and international projects and I am also the editor of the newsletter and all the publications like journals and handbooks and other books. Let me start with this one, a small introduction about where we are in the country. Education shapes the destiny of a nation as you all know because you are all teachers and particularly the manpower which we are looking for. Why people are not coming in large number to the field of engineering education? That is a million dollar question we are trying to solve with the help of MHRD and AICTE. The quality of manpower in any country ultimately determines the sustainable well-being of its people and you all know it is a liberating force which fosters growth, social equality and technological progress and recently India due to the advancement of globalization and internationalization of education finding its own place in the international market especially for knowledge workers. So in order to keep technological advances in control and subservient to the needs of mankind engineering education and training requires reprisal and prompt corrective action. What are the major issues in technical education as of today? The growth demand for education throughout the life cycle. It should be a lifelong learning as you all know that you cannot stop saying that I finished my studies and that is all. Every day you have to update your knowledge in order to spread this to your students. Changes to higher education brought on by technological innovation. What we have learned before is not that today and some researchers they tell that what we learn when we enter into an engineering course will become obsolete when we come out of this course. Internationalization of higher education this is proved by many universities which are coming to India for MOUs and still many universities are trying to enter into MOU with major universities not only for knowledge sake but for number India's were large number of students. An access and equity where government plays a role because government wants everyone to have access and equity everyone should be treated as equal. Then accountability which is many people say which is missing as of today. Then differentiation of academic systems is a problem in the international education once if you finish your engineering education here cannot directly go and take up research or higher education in the western countries because this equality of degrees is not still there. We are working for that in that area and what are the major challenges in technical education. Challenges for technical education and the engineering profession have also horizon from technological and organizational changes and as I told internationalization of business. And due to the rapid increase of IT industry and biotechnology and science and technology there is some fundamental changes which are taking place. This is raised many questions such as to what extent the qualification education and training and employment of engineers need to be embraced in order to meet these challenges and requirements. So the impact of competition, technological change and microeconomic reform on employment you all know that we are facing the global recession period. Increasing part time casual and contract workers leads to the need for people to change jobs more often in a work life. There are heterogeneous views about the purpose of education including renewed focus on social and civic values. The application of new technology to education and training is gaining ground everywhere. Government of India wants to spend more money on training teachers in order to make the younger generation more knowledgeable. Knowledge society's main recommendation is to train teachers primarily. So one notices shifts in employment towards information workers away from traditional jobs and the need for on-the-job training in the workplaces. And these things have just introduced you and they will just skip all these slides because you all know about the Indian higher education scenario right now. And the present government has given promise and given about 3600 crores earmarked for technical vocational education and training as well. And they have upgraded many institutions to the level of national institutions and they have promised to give 10 central universities, upgraded many institutions to technical IITs, national level institutions, RECs have been already converted, 20 RECs have been changed the name to national institute of technologies and another 10 are coming. So M.H.R.D. is planning in a bigger way following the recommendations of knowledge commission. So to give you a small idea about how we are, where we are, number of universities in India has grown from 19 in 1947 to 378 in 2007 and colleges from 27 to 18000 and all. So we are already adding 5 to 16 universities and 300 colleges every year to our education system. This pertains not only to engineering colleges but the general colleges also are in the picture. So what I am trying to say is there is a tremendous growth in the field of education and many people say that recession will not affect two main areas mainly entertainment and education. There will not be any major effect in these two fields. So there is a galloping growth of institutes of higher learning that is also visible. So now right now we have about 367 universities and it is still increasing every month. This will give you a picture about the growth of higher education system in India. The enrollment rate in millions is increasing, has already increased. Universities are increasing, colleges like that they are in the upward trend only. The major aim of the education policy of the government in the post independence era has been to provide free and compulsory education to all children at least up to the primary and elementary stage. But then there is largely, there is a change in the shift, I mean shift in the policy that more and more importance is given to higher education as of today. There is a gap, this is always there. People say that industry, the needs of the industry is not fulfilled by the institutions. Always it is a question raised and we are trying to find solution for that every now and then. What I am trying to say is the gap needs to be bridged through exponentially increased investments in higher education. So basically in the field of technical education, we have lot of potential where we can tap it. Knowledge service including R&D, software development, IT enabled services are in the upward trend as I told you. And basically the world is now looking for India for the knowledge workers. That is my thing based on these three points. The central level of the technical education spectrum consist of AICTE, IITs, IIMs, then national universities and deemed to be universities and then NITs, the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training Institutes, Apprenticeship Training and Educational Consultants and all such major bodies have listed and of course we have tremendous amount of self-financing colleges and other institutions which are trying hard to train people. The key issues in technical and management education in the 11th plan would be a continued focus on increased intake capacity enhancement of quality which we are trying to achieve. Faculty development which has been given priority, optimization of resources through networking, the development of information technology education, improving quality and quantity of research and technologies, modernization development of curriculum, international benchmarking like we have an MBA in the field of technical education which now they have changed this national policy of accreditation to international policy. They are going to follow the Washington Accord which they have signed based on the recommendations of the Abbott which is going to come up from 1st April. So developing capacity in new and emerging technology areas, strategic planning and management of technical education system and informal sector development. In the case of informal sector development Ministry of Labour has year marked 1500 crores especially for the workers. Government of India is planning to start workers technical university in Ayurveda and they are trying to fix the venue I mean the state. This will come in the next academic year already work is in the progress. So to ensure quality in education the university grants commission identifies the universities and colleges with potential for excellence and they give money up to 1 crore for each and every university and special assistant programs would 40 lakhs to 100 lakhs being given. UGC is working hard to improve the quality and you all know about the Tech Hub program funded fully by World Bank and Tech Hub 2 is in the progress. Basically on vocational education now you must have read in the newspaper about the ministry has given 3700 crores year mark exclusively for vocational technical education and ISTE has been given the opportunity to frame out a framework for implementing to all this vocational education upliftment of vocational education with the help of IST and AICT we are working on it. And all these things various vocational education schemes that are available as they told you the World Bank assistant scheme is doing well and Tech Hub 3 has already started from knowledge commission report you can browse this from the internet and you can get more details about that. So I will skip a few slides and I will go back to the ISTE part. Indian society for technical education is a national professional non-profit making society of engineering educators as well as students of technical institutions registered under the societies of registration act of 1960. Association of principles of technical institution was transformed into Indian society for technical education in 1968 with the view to broaden its activities to advance the course of technical education. See in the year 1941 principles of all the engineering colleges they joined together and formed an association which is called association of principles of technical institutions and it went on up to 1967 and after independence they thought that there should be a body to monitor the quality intake and everything like your UGC especially for the engineering education. So AICTE was born and it was not initiated as an act of parliament that was done only in the year 1984. So ISTE is the mother of All India Council for technical education. The logo of AICTE the formation rules strategies everything was formed with the help of ISTE only. So the major objective of the ISTE is to assist and contribute in the production and development of top quality professional engineers and technicians needed by the industries and other organizations. Being the only national organization of educators in the field of engineering and technology, ISTE effectively contributes in various missions of the union government. The Ministry of Human Resource Development, AICTE, Department of Science and Technology Ministry of Information Technology, State Governments are all well associated with the ISTE programs related to technical education. Remember this is only a professional body. We don't give certificates we don't conduct courses exclusively. We help institutions to conduct courses. We fund the institutions to run the courses with the help of Government of India. We as such don't have any courses. So what are the main objectives of ISTE? Formulate the general goals and responsibilities of technical education modify curriculum educational process to changing conditions develop effective teachers and educational administrators improve instructional methods and practices and administrative usages. Then enhance professional ideas and standards foster research as complementary to teacher cultivate fraternal spirit amongst the teachers, administrators, industrialists and professionals bring about effective linkage between technical institutions, industry and society and it has got a couple of awards also which I will be explaining to you. Award, honorary fellowships, awards and prizes for furthering the objectives of technical education to encourage teachers to be in the field of engineering education. So the structure is like this. There is an executive council at a national level. No one is the owner of this ISTE every year we elect from different parts of the country and executive council is elected by the members of ISTE they form the executive council out of the executive council members elected they select the office bearers like president vice president secretary and we run the show for 3 years and again there will be election and new faces will come. It is purely run based on the membership fees that we collect from teachers and for all the projects we get funded from government and various other funding agencies. As I initially told you we are not a profit making organization we are a service organization for the development of teachers and engineering education. We have got 63,250 teachers as members 195,000 students as members, student members and 80 institutional members. We have around 3,200 institutions like both engineering institutions as well as political institutions out of that only 1680 institutional members we have and 957 faculty chapters you may if you have 50 members in one institutions you can form a chapter and you can have your own office bearers for the chapters like that we have 957 faculty chapters throughout the country and likewise instead of I mean I told you if you have only 25 members I am sorry if you have only 25 members you can form a faculty chapter and if you have 50 student members you can form a student chapter. We have about 995 student chapters as of today. The membership fee is a very meager amount of 250 rupees per annum for teachers and 120 rupees for 4 years for students even a cost of coke will not do if you go to the restaurant and this that is why I said we are not profit making in return you may ask what will you give if you become a member you are entitled to participate in all the workshops and training programs conducted through IST preference will be given for members and you will get a bi-monthly newsletter which will give you information about what is happening in the field of technical education in the country and if you buy our publications you will get around 20 to 25 percent discount. Then what are the major activities of ISTE? Curriculum development updating which we regularly do every 5 years and we recommend to AICT. The AICT recommendations broad guidelines of various curriculum is formed or is framed by IST only with all the experts AICT is sponsored short term training programs which in short called STTPs for engineering teachers and practicing professionals which is fully funded by MHRD through AICT. Preparation of course materials, teacher manuals and other institutional resource materials under ISTE learning materials project which is fully funded by Swiss Development Corporation. Preparation of learning materials for working professional is selected in selected areas under ISTE WPLP working professional learning project which is also funded by MHRD AICT. Special short term programs for teachers, industries and other professional organization time to time we give money for them to organize. Then we conduct seminars, workshops, conferences on topics of relevance of technical education. We means institutions conduct we give money to them to conduct. Information technology oriented programs conduct of entrepreneurship awareness camp for young teachers and students. Department of Science and Technology has given the responsibility to us to conduct various camps like what we conduct this STTP program we also conduct this entrepreneurship development program fully funded by DST. Every year we conduct around 200 programs throughout the country for both teachers and as well as for students. Then project formulation, implementation and appraisal they come to us for help we will give them help with the experts which we have. Then preparation of directories on technical education which facilities and expertise. We compile the addresses of all the engineering institutions and they have the places from where in which you can get travel grants, research grants, various other governmental agencies where in which you can apply for other programs all we compile. Then publication of a bi-monthly ISTE newsletter publication of a quarterly Indian Journal of Technical Education for last 32 years we have been publishing this. Then ISTE handbook as I told you then learning materials and publication of various monograms. See this learning materials was restricted only to the field of electronics and computer science under the SDC project. Now they said this can be extended to other faculties as well. Then what are the major aims and objectives major aim of the ISTE is to help the students in personality development, faculty members in career development so as to produce high quality professionals needed by the institutions, industries and other organizations at national and international level. Then membership are classified into five different categories honorary fellowship this we identify the major stalwarts of engineering education we honor them no fees for that it is a honor for them and life membership you can become a life member by paying a fees of 2050 once and you become a life member and you will give you a plastic card like what the banks are giving and with that you can have you can enjoy the facilities of ISTE activities. Then annual membership for about 250 rupees then student membership for 120 rupees for 4 years then institutional membership if your institutional is a member of ISTE they have to pay 25,000 rupees once then you will become an institutional member and IIT Mumbai is one of the earlier institutional members they say way back in 20 years before they have become members. This is about the membership graph that we have as of today and annual membership then life members then student members. Then we conduct national convention of for students every year we conduct a national convention where all the students are invited to a particular place with the help of sponsorship from industries we conduct this has been started only before last year 2001 only we have started this so about 1000 students will from different institutions will come and take part in various competitions to encourage them we give them awards prizes and everything it is a grand get together for all the students of technical education which will provide an opportunity for the students to meet each other then annual convention where teachers meet this is conducted in the month of December every year it is completely sponsored by state governments and MHRD and more than 1000 teachers will come and one theme will be selected according to the current requirements people will come and present papers they discuss this activity will be there for 3 days you can meet people experts professors Nobel laureates and things like that. Various other business meetings in the society will also be conducted during the annual convention. Then we have 15 sections following it up each section suppose if you are in Maharashtra Maharashtra and Goa section you have to approach the office members you can become an institution member or you can become a member forwarded through them and you can be a representative you may ask why this is required this is required because from each section based on the number of teachers present for every 1500 members one member will be elected for the Executive Council so they form ISTE suppose you have about 10,000 members in Maharashtra so you have divided by 1500 you have that many members which you will elect teachers will elect out of this 10,000 people 1% or 10% will be elected or 8% will be elected they will go to Delhi they will form the team they will run the show it is purely democratic so the national level as I already told you we have conducted so many summer schools and winter schools which we are popular for and conducted trained around 56,000 teachers in engineering college and 26,000 around 26,000 in polytechnics purely funded by Machadi in AICT we have a continued education program where we have produced various models and now we have stopped this because we are having linkage with all the IIT's where they are producing with the help of this CEDP programs we are disseminating the information produced by them then every year we prepare the model syllabus as I told you curriculum development we do this at the national level we conduct this awareness crams training manuals bi-monthly newsletter conferences and we have a scheme called professional visiting professor scheme where a new engineering college which are expecting or who wants services of an experienced professor we pay them TADA and everything local hospitality to be borne by the institution and all their expenses will be borne by the ISTE and you have to apply for ISTE for becoming a visiting professor for various institutions. In international collaboration we have represented UNESCO and AWA-CEA we have participated in SCACP with the Canada project Canada India Institutional Cooperation project then industry institutional linkage project from Canada then commonwealth program association of continuing education program and all this we have participated and still we are a member and as I told you World Bank project impact we have produced about 45 learning materials under World Bank and SDC and DOE then learning material project which is still there which is continuing right now and then we are the member of World Federation of Association of Colleges and Polytechnics and we have collaboration with International Federation for Engineering Education Societies which is a new society formed 2 years before which has come out from association American Society for Engineering Education that is there from 1979 so we are a member of that one and they are bringing out a journal called Journal of Engineering Education that JEE is going to complete under the year next year so they thought that ISTE should involve and they have come out with a solution saying that this can be obtained say for a meager amount of 325 rupees if you are a member of ISTE if you are a non-member if you want to directly get the 4 issues of JEE you have to pay 5000 rupees say 100 dollars you have to pay but then they have given an opportunity for ISTE members if you want to subscribe you can subscribe for 325 rupees for 4 issues inclusive of all the charges of posting and everything so we have entered into an MOU with them and they have given and we are printing here and ISTE has been given the responsibility to publish this for this whole Asia Pacific region and I am the editor for Asia Pacific region and if you have any queries you can write to me then what are the future we are planning for the future and we have got certain goals we would like to have the distant education mode of technical education through E-learning now professor Patak is working very hard to put through this E-content through open source and he is trying his level best to get the dissemination the contents disseminate through all the technical teachers and ISTE will definitely give him full support in all his endeavors and we have now in the same we have got the same goal and we will definitely cooperate with professor Patak and IIT CEP to achieve this goal so development of informal technical education as I told you we are going to have the workers technical university in Hyderabad which we are also a part of it and we are going to establish a technical educational national staff college we don't have we engineers we don't have an academic staff college like UGC is having so we have already given a proposal to city and still it is pending it has to be cleared from MHRD for funds to create a national database on technical education system which we don't have suppose you want to know how many civil engineers are there in the country maybe you have to tell only approximate figures but then we are planning to have a database with us suppose some huge project is going to be there then we can give the database to various states to help them so carrier planning, personality development for students and faculty development for teachers enhance number of short term training program for technical teachers now right now we are conducting around 400 programs per annum which we are going to increase this to 1000 that is our aim in the near future so develop the mechanism for periodic professional refinement of faculty members how whatever you do there is a huge cry saying that it is not sufficient so how to do this so we will have to work out on that and find out so about I told you about the visiting professor scheme it is all available in our net you can you can take it then this publication you will get free of cost if you are a member 6 issues of newsletter and it is already appreciated by all the members and they are looking forward for all this and the e form of this one is in the net you can get it then IJTE engine journal of technical education the last 33 years we have been publishing this and the editor of this journal and you can send the papers research paper or refer it and collected paper or a general article on a pedagogy of technical in the field of technical education you can send it to me and we will send this to a team of experts blind for blind review and if it is a publication standard if it meets the publication standard we will publish that in the journal then I told you about the IST handbook it contains lot of information and it is the unique kind where you do not have this type of handbook especially for technical education I do not think there is any publication of this sort then CICP publication we are only printing that we are not doing anything the articles are written by the Canadians then students primer every 3 years we collect articles from expert teachers saying that how the students behave in the class about ragging about attendance how to pass the examination how to face the examination how to face the interview relating to all the students affairs we collect articles from experts and we publish this student primer and it is sent free for all the students chapters we do not sell this and it is our website address you can take this and it every fortnight we update this then as I told you we to encourage teachers and students number of awards about 30 awards for students and about 27 awards for teachers both national and regional level we invite applications from students and teachers we scrutinize this with the help of experts and the award committee will select the award winners and during the annual convention of students and teachers it will be awarded to the award winners so as I told you about the learning materials project if you are really interested in writing a book we encourage you we publish this through leading publishers in the country and you will be given royalty based on the number of copies sold for the initial cast you will be given some amount for typing another work if you are really interested straight away write to me send an application you will take up that issue then this working professional learning project if you want to write a monograph or working professionals people who are in the industry you are welcome send the application to me we will scrutinize and we will get back to you then IET project like this content development IET also wanted ISTE to help we have entered that in the month of July 2005 but unfortunately that project is not taking up because of their internal problems but still that MOU is on then this Indo-UK REC project the British council has given funds for the teachers for exchange programs teachers from India will go there and spend about 2 years there teachers from UK come here this is exclusively for the 1990s it was there in the year 1995 to 2002 so the British council gave ISTE a chance to evaluate the performance of that entire Indo-UK REC project and the chairman of this project was Deep Agarwal who is the UGC I mean this UPSC chairman right now and I had an opportunity to work within to evaluate this project and we have submitted the report to them then about this technical vocational education training program AICT is very keen and it is going to come up in a large way big way there is a meeting on Friday at Delhi and huge amount of money is going to be given for ISTE and we have given a proposal like occupational training centers of ISTE how it can be implemented and things like that funding will come from a much RDP only once it is finalized we will put in the net and you can approaches for setting up of an occupational training center then entrepreneurship training both for teachers and students as I told you this DST is giving funds and we are the national coordinating agency for the entrepreneurship training centers if you want to start an entrepreneurship sell also you can write to us we will help you this is basically for teachers for students and they want to certify ISTE to certify the courses conducted by various EDP cells which we are working out because there are some copyright issues in that one IPR issues in that one and that will be solved and we are into that project also other projects which we are interested in as I told you that ASW American Society for Engineering Education then TAIFAC mission you know about TAIFAC they are giving funds to start the reality core subjects TAIFAC core project so we are the agency or we are the one of the agencies to identify the experts for the TAIFAC core mission project and whatever TAIFAC projects wherever TAIFAC project is implemented ISTE will give helping hand to make them a big success one of them is IIT Mumbai over Pathak Sab's E outreach project we are playing a small role where the school played in Ramayana we are also playing a small role in Pathak's projects and we have got this MHRD TVE project which is also coming into a good shape and another one is the IUCEE India project we are the India partners Indo-US continuing education as Indo-US Center for Engineering Education so they conduct programs like what we do in ISTE but then slightly different it is fully funded by two great people Deshpande and Infosys Narayan Murthy last year they conducted this program 580 teachers were trained for 27 programs about for about a month one and a half month it was conducted fully residential program as a fully residential program in Infosys Mysore campus this year also we have got is the second one which is going to be conducted from this 20th to July 15th or so if you are interested you go to that website and you can apply and if you have any difficulty and the coordinator for the India India mission you can write to me we will take up with that issue last time it was 2000 rupees for a course this time it is 5000 rupees for a course you can go through the various course details what are the titles if you are interested apply in that one we will facilitate and we will help you to get trained through this but only difference is the person who is going to come and give you give lecture and conduct the class will come from US only US experts will come some Indians who have settled there will also come there last time about 56 US experts came to Infosys and gave lecture for about one week course 27 courses were conducted this year also we have if you have any interest write to me we will do it then we are planning to construct a guest house in IIT I mean we are in the IIT Bombay campus only they have given land free of cost to us and our building is built with the help of Canadian funds and M.H.R.D funds IIT Delhi sorry IIT Delhi and the building was constructed with the help of M.H.R.D fundings and Canadian fundings now we are planning to construct a guest house this will be exclusively used for teachers who come for Delhi for various business purposes they are finding it difficult to get the guest house accommodation and things like that about 50 rooms will be there with the seminar hall and all the facilities which is going to take up in another 2-3 months because we have lot of difficulties with MCD and all those we will not pay any single pie to anybody and we will not grease the palms of anybody and that is our policy and with normal speed it took 3 years for us to get the permission from MCD and they have already given permission and funds are with us various institutions have given we have collected more than 1 crore exclusively for this building fund and this guest house construction project is for about 3.5 crores so that all the teachers in the country can go if it is available they will be given priority at a very minimum rate for the operation expenses only. That is our next project and the institutions from the south major about tax we have collected from institutions from the south exclusive from self-enhancing people they are ready to give and they are very generous to give this some of the pictures I would like to show these are all the plan that we are planning to from the architect the existing building and the building plans and thank you very much for your patience and if you have any questions as to how to approach for various projects we will have a discussion for another 10 minutes or so