AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professorship Scheme(DVPS)

Overview

About DVPS

The AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professorship pays an engineer Rs 10,000 for a day spent lecturing and nothing at all for a day spent reviewing a syllabus. The person it pays is an experienced industry engineer or a retired INAE Fellow, never a student: the scheme buys teaching time for an AICTE-approved engineering college, and no money under it reaches anyone enrolled there. INAE selects, AICTE funds, the college hosts. And the last published account INAE gave of its own scheme, in the Annual Report for 2022-23, records it on hold from May 2022, which is where any nominee has to start.

Three parties have to agree before a Distinguished Visiting Professor exists. The industry expert or retired INAE Fellow fills Part I of the nomination format; an AICTE-approved engineering college fills Part II and commits to hosting; and the Indian National Academy of Engineering, which launched the scheme jointly with AICTE in 1999, runs the selection and pays the honorarium. A student never enters that chain, and neither does a college that AICTE has not approved.

What the professor is paid for is narrower than the job description suggests. INAE limits the honorarium to lecture sessions for students, guiding student projects and other research activity, and states plainly that curriculum review, project evaluation and discussions with college authorities are not counted as lecture days (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme). The visits are short and capped: up to two visits per semester, a maximum of three consecutive days each.

In the last year INAE reported on, the scheme was not small. The Academy recorded 54 Distinguished Visiting Professors whose tenure ran from July 2021 to June 2022, associated with 69 AICTE-approved engineering colleges across India, and 21 lecture days logged during April 2022 from the faculty coordinators of 8 associated colleges (INAE Annual Report 2022-23).

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

The tenure year runs July to June, and the deadline sits a couple of months ahead of it. The last one INAE has posted is April 15, 2022, for the 2022-23 academic year, itself a revision of an earlier date, and the scheme page still carries it (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme).

Then the scheme stopped. INAE's Annual Report for 2022-23 records that it was put on hold from May 2022 on a notification received from AICTE, and states later in the same report that it was still on hold when that report was written (INAE Annual Report 2022-23). The Academy's revised budget shows the same thing in money: Rs 120 lakh was set aside for the scheme in the 2023-24 estimate, the revised estimate for AICTE schemes came to nil, and the footnote against the line reads that AICTE put the scheme on suspension during FY 2022-23 with efforts on for revival in FY 2023-24 (INAE, Revised Budget Estimate 2023-24).

Nothing INAE has published since reverses that. Its Annual Report for 2023-24 and its Annual Report for 2024-25 carry no account of the scheme at all, and no application window later than the 2022 one has appeared on the scheme page.

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The person the scheme is built around is mid-career or later, and the qualifying evidence is industrial, not academic. A nominee needs at least a graduate degree in engineering or an equivalent qualification and a minimum of ten years in industry, with distinguished work shown through products, technology, processes, patents, publications or awards. Retired Fellows of INAE became eligible in 2018 and now apply on the same form.

The age band is the one place where the two official sources disagree, and it matters to anyone near the edge. The revised scheme document AICTE hosts, dated December 2020, sets the range at 40 to 75 years (AICTE, revised DVP scheme document), while INAE's own scheme page states 45 to 75 years (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme). Neither document notes the difference or dates the change. Both allow the Selection Committee to relax the limit in exceptional cases, so a candidate in their early forties should ask INAE which band is being applied before assembling a file.

Being an INAE Fellow helps but is not required. INAE's published list for 2021 puts seven names under Selected Retired INAE Fellows and nine under Selected Industry and R&D Experts, the second group drawn from ARCI, TIFR, CSIR-NIIST, C-MET, ARAI, NEERI and IGCAR (INAE, Selected DVPs for year 2021).

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

A conflict of interest ends a nomination outright: INAE requires that the individual, or his or her company where it is private, has no commercial dealing with the educational institution being visited. A person who has already completed a tenure cannot re-apply, so the professorship is a one-time association rather than a renewable career track. The host side is bounded too, since the scheme applies only to visits to AICTE-approved engineering colleges and a professor may be attached to no more than two of them across the whole tenure. Days spent on curriculum review or meetings with college authorities are excluded from payment even though the professor is expected to do that work, and an online session earns the honorarium with no travel or lodging reimbursement attached (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

Continuation is annual and it is earned. The first appointment runs for one year and can be extended to a maximum of five, with each year's extension decided by the Selection Committee on the strength of the professor's contributions during the year and the feedback the affiliated college sends in. Where a professor needs to step away, INAE allows a break of up to two years within the tenure. A request to move to a different college is only considered after a full year of association, even if the professor decides to stop after one semester, and the reason has to be stated in the request (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme).

In the last cycle INAE reported, the year running July 2021 to June 2022, extensions outnumbered fresh awards: 16 new selections against extensions granted to 18 INAE Fellows and 20 industry experts, which is how the roll reached 54 (INAE Annual Report 2022-23). A professorship here is worth more in its later years than its first.

What you get

Award & benefits

Two of the entries below are the host college's obligation rather than INAE's.

There is no consolidated annual figure, because earnings track the lecture days a host college actually schedules within the visit cap.

• The Distinguished Visiting Professor will be reimbursed air-fare in “Y-Class” or actual fares if performed by Rail or approved INAE rate if travel is performed by Road.
• The Distinguished Visiting Professoris entitled to an honorarium of ₹ 10,000/- per lecture day.
• For on-line sessions of DVP Programs, the Experts will be paid only Honorariums of ₹ 10,000/- per day without travelling/lodging expenses based on mutually decided timings between concerned DVPs in association with the concerned Institutes.

What to prepare

Documents required

Part I asks the expert for more than a CV. It wants a career synopsis of not more than 2000 words covering qualifications, degrees, industrial experience and any specialised training in research, design, management or projects, along with publications, details of IPR, the number of Masters and PhD students guided, teaching, industry and research experience stated separately in years, and the activities proposed. It also needs an endorsement by the head of the industry and confirmation that the head of the proposed engineering institution has consented (AICTE, DVP application form).

Part II is the college's page and it is where nominations get stuck. The institution has to give its permanent AICTE ID from the AICTE web portal, say whether the programme is accredited by the National Board of Accreditation, name the subject or specialisation in which support is sought, list the activities the expert will undertake and explain how the institute will assess the impact of the professor's contribution. The page carries the signatures and seals of both the Head of the Institution and the Head of Department, plus the contact details of the faculty coordinator. Every page of the form must also carry the applicant's signature (AICTE, steps to apply for the DVP scheme).

Step by step

How to apply

There is no application portal and no application link on the scheme's public record, so the file moves on paper. AICTE's steps sheet sends a nominee to INAE's scheme page or to AICTE's staff development schemes listing for the form, then wants the applicant's signature on every page, the supporting documents, the copy of the AICTE letter of approval, and dispatch by registered or speed post to the Executive Director at INAE. It is blunt about the wrong address: an application sent to the AICTE office will not be considered (AICTE, steps to apply for the DVP scheme).

Two doors lead into the same file. An expert or retired Fellow can start it and then find a host college to complete Part II, or an AICTE-approved engineering institution can approach INAE directly with its details and the subject area in which it wants an eminent person from industry, and INAE matches from there (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme).

A posted nomination generates nothing to check afterwards. No acknowledgement number is issued and no portal holds the file, so the only status anyone can obtain is whatever INAE's office gives out by phone or email, and the outcome becomes public only when INAE puts a selection list on the scheme page, as it did for the cohort selected in 2021 (INAE, Selected DVPs for year 2021).

How winners are picked

Selection process

A Selection Committee decides. INAE's Annual Report for 2022-23 lists it as the AICTE-INAE Distinguished Visiting Professorship Scheme Committee, with a chairman, members drawn from academia, industry and research laboratories, and a nominated representative each from AICTE and CII (INAE Annual Report 2022-23). The same committee handled fresh selection, the annual extension decision and any relaxation of the age limit in an exceptional case.

Appointments arrive in a batch with a common start date rather than one at a time: the professors selected in 2021 took effect together from July 1, 2021. How the committee weighs one file against another has never been published. The scheme document sets the entry test and stops there, which leaves the 2000-word career synopsis in Part I doing all the persuading.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

The obligations run both ways and they are specific. The professor supplies a one to two page abstract of each lecture with the relevant slides or material so the college can circulate it to students, and may take student projects on real-life and shop-floor problems drawn from his or her own industry work, supervised jointly with a faculty member either on campus or at the industry. The college appoints a senior professor as coordinator of the programme to arrange lectures and supervise projects, and provides the working facilities and hospitality. After each visit, INAE collects a feedback report from both the expert and the college, and that feedback is what the extension decision rests on. Under the online module, up to two interactive sessions run in a semester, each spanning a maximum of three days that should preferably be consecutive, and where they cannot be, the three lecture days may be spread across a maximum of two weeks for a single visit (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme).

Get help

Contact

Proposals go to the Executive Director, Indian National Academy of Engineering, Ground Floor, Block-II, Technology Bhavan, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi 110016, phone 011-26582475 (INAE, AICTE-INAE DVP Scheme). Two older versions of the same instruction are still in circulation and both are wrong today: AICTE's steps-to-apply sheet prints INAE's former Gurgaon address (AICTE, steps to apply for the DVP scheme), and the revised scheme document addresses proposals to the Deputy Executive Director rather than the Executive Director (AICTE, revised DVP scheme document). INAE's headquarters email, inaehq@inae.in, has stayed constant across all of them, and a phone call costs less than a misdirected file.

Source

Official links

Frequently asked questions

From the official scheme FAQ (myScheme)

Read this

Disclaimer

Disclaimer

Scheme details are compiled from myScheme, the Government of India’s official scheme-discovery platform, and are reproduced without alteration. Amounts, deadlines and eligibility change between cycles, so always confirm on the official links above before applying. Expertie does not process applications or charge fees.

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