The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the country?s top technical education regulator, is set to mount a stricter vigil across its offices after CBI raids unearthed a scam last year. Close Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras will soon keep an eagle eye on all transactions across AICTE offices to ensure transparency. The proposal was approved at a recent meeting of the AICTE Executive Council.
"The move is being made not just to keep a watch but essentially to keep its house in order. It is expected to be implemented soon", highly placed sources in the AICTE said. The complete recorded CCTV footage will also be kept in a library for future reference.
The minutes of the meeting accessed by The Indian Express say that the move aimed at "strengthening security measures" at AICTE offices entails the "proposal to install CCTV IP camera-based access management system through a software and also the facility to record the video captured through CCTV and convert the same into digital video disks and store them in a library".
AICTE will soon be inviting tenders for the CCTV systems installation across its eight regional offices in India and its eight bureaus.
The AICTE is also trying hard to disassociate itself from the rot of corruption that has brought its credibility under a cloud. So much so that at an Executive Council meeting earlier this year, the AICTE decided that the former and present employees of the Council against whom FIRs were lodged by the CBI "should be kept away from the working of the Council". The CBI had arrested AICTE Member Secretary K Narayan Rao and lodged a FIR against AICTE head Ram Avtar Yadav for corruption in July last year.