Duplicate Faculty in Engineering Colleges – The Story of Brazen Violation of Norms & a Silent AICTE
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
May 11, 2015
Large number of Technical Institutes (Engineering & other) are flouting norms in a brazen manner. This analysis is from the data available on the AICTE website about Faculty in such institutes. In the eight 8 states analysed, large number of duplicate records were found and thousands of names repeated across intistutes.
At Factly, our endeavour is not just to make public data meaningful to the common man, but also use public data to  expose/highlight irregularities and in turn help better governance. As a part of our daily routine of scouting government websites for relevant data, we stumbled upon the faculty data on the AICTE website. AICTE stands for All India Council for Technical Education and is the apex regulatory body for technical education in the country. As per norms, a faculty can also work in one college and cannot simultaneously work in more than one college.
The data was organized state wise and was in PDF files. It had details of the Faculty (First & Last Name), Name of the College & Branch. The data ran into tens of PDF files for some of the states. The data for AP & Telangana for instance was in 74 such files.
It is an open secret that the same faculty name is used in multiple colleges during uploading details and also during the inspections. One would expect that those violating norms would be careful enough to not leave evidence. But the analysis of this data came as a big surprise for us.
The Process
We chose 8 different states from different parts of the country namely Andhra Pradesh & Telangana (the data for these two states is presented together), Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa, Tamil Nadu & Uttar Pradesh. Then we extracted all the faculty data available on the AICTE website (pertaining to these 8 states) and extracted relevant numbers. Data was organized in the following format.
The following aspects were looked at for the analysis for each of the states mentioned above
The Name Confusion
There were two issues with names. Some records in the list did not have a last name. Even if they had, it was just a single alphabet. Hence we took two different parameters. One with matching first & last names, another with a matching first & valid last name. (A valid last name is one that has at least 2 characters). It could also be argued that two different people can share the same name. While that possibility is there, it is near impossible for thousands of faculty to share the same first & last names.
Faculty with Same matching First & Last Names
Except for AP & Telangana, we did not find a major difference in the number of records with a valid last name and those with a single alphabet last name.
The percentage of faculty whose names repeated varied from 18% to 58%. The lowest was in Karnataka with 18% and the highest in Uttar Pradesh with 58%. Following UP was Orissa with 41% and Gujarat with 32%. Even accounting the possibility of different people sharing the same name, it is highly impossible for such a large number of people to share names.
These states also had very high number of duplicate faculty. In other words, 7948 people from AP & Telangana had their names repeating in two or more colleges. For Tamil Nadu, this number stood at 8842. UP was third with 8099. Gujarat had the lowest with 2374, probably because of the lower number of total faculty.
Number of Colleges with Duplicate Faculty
All those colleges with at least one duplicate name were counted and their percentage against the total number of colleges in the state was calculated. Orissa topped with every college in the state falling into this category except one. All the states analysed had 90% or more colleges falling into this category. In other words, 9 out of every 10 colleges fell into this category in each of these 8 states.
The Learning
As for this issue, we hope that AICTE finally wakes up from its deep slumber and takes some action. When common citizens can find such anomalies, it should be much easier for AICTE to find such patterns from its own data base.
We also want this case to highlight the power of opening up data. Most government departments (Central & State) still do not put all their data in the public domain. Even when they do, they do so in closed formats like PDFs. The government should immediately focus on strengthening the data portal of India. It will help the government immensely in decision making, course correction among other things.
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Featured Image Source: By Trmwikifa [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons