All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), a statutory body, is a national-level council for technical education under the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development.

The AICTE has around 10,000 institutes, colleges and universities — both government and private — under it. Of these, around 5,000 plus are engineering and polytechnic colleges. These institutes are spread across India. 

In the present scenario, the infrastructure of a large number of these colleges and institutes is not being utilized to its maximum capacity.

Centre for Strategy and Leadership (CSL) has proposed making the huge and readily available training infrastructure of AICTE colleges for conducting training programmes of various Ministerial Departments for optimum utilization.

The AICTE is exploring the feasibility of conducting courses, workshops and programmes of central government organizations and their departments at times when the infrastructure of its colleges remains unused.

A study was conducted, in June 2019, by CSL on behalf of AICTE to better understand the training infrastructure requirements of a set of Ministries and Departments under the Central Government.

The respondents were selected from a curated list of Ministerial departments which were found to be conducting training programmes and on the basis of their willingness to participate in the study.

The sample set of respondents who participated in the study comprised multiple central Government ministries and departments.

The findings of this study determined that 82% of the respondents were interested in the proposed idea of using the existing infrastructure of AICTE for their training requirements.

This study will help develop an optimal infrastructure sharing model that can reduce cost and increase the convenience of sourcing infrastructure for conducting training programmes.