AICTE-ISTE INDUCTION/REFRESHER PROGRAMME SCHEME(IIRPS)

Overview

About IIRPS

Money under this scheme moves from AICTE to a college, and stops there. The college uses it to run a week-long training course for teachers, spending the grant on honoraria, resource persons and course material. A student has no way in and receives nothing: no seat, no stipend, no fee waiver, and the myScheme record names the beneficiary as a University or Institution rather than an individual (myScheme, AICTE-ISTE Induction/Refresher Programme Scheme). Two readers can actually do something with what follows. One is the principal or head of department deciding whether to file a proposal. The other is the teacher who has seen a poster for somebody else's programme and wants to know how to get into the room.

The All India Council for Technical Education runs the scheme jointly with the Indian Society for Technical Education, and the rulebook is a four-page document footed July 2020. It sets the shape of the thing in a few lines: the programme runs one week, meaning six working days, the funding limit is Rs 3 lakh, and the training comes in two types, induction and refresher (AICTE-ISTE Induction/Refresher Programme, Scheme Document). Every figure quoted on this page carries that July 2020 stamp unless another date is given, and AICTE still hangs that same PDF off its faculty listing as the scheme document (AICTE, Opportunities for Faculty: Overview).

That listing also puts a size on the scheme, counting 100 Refresher programmes and 50 Orientation programmes at Rs 300000 per programme (AICTE, Opportunities for Faculty: Overview). It is where the naming gets slippery too, since it heads the entry "AICTE-ISTE Orientation/Refresher Programme" and then describes induction programmes in the sentence underneath.

Whether a fresh round is open is a fair question and the honest answer is layered. AICTE's Faculty Development Cell still carries "AICTE-ISTE Induction/Refresher Programs" in its published list of responsibilities (AICTE, Faculty Development Cell), and the Council's AQIS index still numbers an AICTE-ISTE Orientation/Refresher Programme among its faculty development schemes (AICTE, AICTE Quality Improvement Schemes). The current Faculty Development Schemes page, though, runs through ATAL Academy programmes, the Distinguished Professional Scheme, QIP, the QIP-PG certificate, the Research Promotion Scheme, VAANI and the rest without naming this one at all (AICTE, Faculty Development Schemes). ISTE's website is quieter still: what it invites applications for today is a self-financed line of short term training programmes and faculty development programmes, where the organising institute pays its own costs (ISTE, Self-Finance STTPs and FDPs). No closure order has been published by either body, so the accurate statement is that the scheme has not been withdrawn on paper and has not been advertised recently either.

Who runs it

Provider

At a glance

Key details

Calendar

Important dates

No annual calendar for this scheme appears on either the AICTE or the ISTE website, and the scheme document sets no last date. Its only deadlines run after a sanction, not before one. The most recent cycle traceable in correspondence that anyone has put on the web is 2018-19, and its programmes were still being delivered online in late 2020, with an option to hold the balance over for face to face delivery from January 2021 (ISTE sanction letter of 9 October 2020, filed in a college NAAC self-study report).

Who can apply

Eligibility criteria

The host has to be an AICTE approved institution or a university department imparting technical education. Beyond approval status, the conditions land on people and history rather than on the campus: the coordinator must be full-time regular faculty with adequate experience in teaching and research and with publications to show for it, an institute may have at most two proposals considered in a year, and a college that has arranged a self-financing programme in the preceding twelve months is preferred. ISTE charges Rs 1500 per proposal as a processing fee, payable by RTGS or NEFT, and will not accept a proposal until that fee is paid (Scheme Document, sections II and VII). No minimum number of years in existence is stipulated anywhere in the document, and it does not ask the host to have an ISTE chapter.

That self-financing preference is worth reading twice, because it points at the other ISTE line. A college that has never organised a programme on its own money is at a disadvantage when its proposal reaches the committee, and ISTE's self-financed route is the obvious place to build that record.

For the teacher who wants to attend, the rulebook is oddly silent on qualifications. It regulates the composition of a batch, not the credentials of the people in it: forty participants per batch, no more than ten per cent and in absolute terms no more than four of them from the host institute, no more than half from the host's own district, and the remaining places filled with preference for nearby districts (Scheme Document, section VIII B). Because the rulebook fixes the shape of the batch and nothing about the person filling a place in it, the admission line gets drawn on the host's own brochure, and different hosts have drawn it in different places. A Delhi college running sponsored slots in early 2021 took faculty from AICTE approved institutions and also let research scholars and people from industry register, gave preference to ISTE members and then worked first come first served (Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, AICTE-ISTE sponsored one week online Induction/Refresher Programme). A teacher deciding whether a particular room is open to them should read that brochure rather than the scheme document.

Who cannot apply

Exclusions

There is no list of barred categories in the scheme document, which suits a scheme whose applicant is an institution. What the document does carry is a set of hard bars on the programme itself. A sanctioned programme cannot be combined with any other professional body, AICTE-ISTE must be the principal sponsor and no other major sponsor is allowed, although the institute may raise extra money from any source to cover its own overspend. Money released against the topic named in the sanction has no authorised use on a second course, however close the subject. And the host may not charge participants a registration fee, a condition the document pushes onto the brochure by requiring the no-fee line to appear on the registration form itself (Scheme Document, sections VII and VIII A).

Continuation

Renewal conditions

A sanction covers one programme and ends with the utilisation certificate for that programme. The recurring element is the annual cap rather than any renewal right: two proposals per institute per year, each judged fresh on its own merits and on how the institute performed the last time it ran one, since previous performance sits in the selection criteria (Scheme Document, sections II and VIII A). A college that ran a programme last year starts the next proposal from the same place, with a track record attached.

What you get

Award & benefits

The Rs 3 lakh ceiling is the number everyone quotes, and it is a ceiling on the whole programme, not a transfer to anyone. Inside it the document sets two sub-caps: honorarium to the course coordinator may not exceed one per cent of the sanctioned grant, and honorarium to resource persons may not exceed 20 per cent, with total spending capped at the sanction in any case. Release happens in two tranches, the first at either ninety or fifty per cent of the sanctioned amount before the event on receipt of the institute's acceptance letter, the second after the closing paperwork lands (Scheme Document, section VII).

What that ceiling looks like in a real sanction is smaller and much more specific, and one such sanction can be read in full, though not on an AICTE or an ISTE website. A Pune engineering college filed it as evidence in its NAAC self-study report, where it sits as a scan of an ISTE letterhead dated 9 October 2020, signed by ISTE's Executive Secretary and by the Director of AICTE's Faculty Development Cell, addressed to one named coordinator for one named six-day course. With the pandemic having stalled the 2018-19 cycle, it rewrote that college's budget head by head for online delivery (ISTE sanction letter, 9 October 2020, filed in a NAAC self-study report).

Read those figures for what they are. They are one institute's sanctioned heads for one online course in one cycle, published by that institute rather than by either sponsor, and neither AICTE nor ISTE presents them anywhere as a rate card. They are worth quoting only because they show how a Rs 3 lakh ceiling gets spent in practice, and how far below it a sanction can land.

A teacher who attends gets less than the poster suggests and more than nothing. There is no travel or daily allowance head anywhere in the grant, and no boarding line either. What the participant is promised is a free copy of the course material the programme develops, no registration fee, and a certificate, and the certificate is conditional: the document reserves it for participants who attend and clear the end-of-programme test with at least 60 per cent marks (Scheme Document, sections VII and VIII D).

• Funding to the institution/University: ₹ 3,00,000/-

What to prepare

Documents required

The paperwork is front-loaded and clock-driven, which is the part institutes underestimate. An ISTE offer letter and the institute's acceptance letter in reply are what make the programme exist at all, and the documents needed for the first instalment must reach ISTE within 15 days of the offer letter arriving. The closing bundle, covering the participant list, signed feedback, event photographs, paid vouchers and bills, two bound copies of the proceedings, the question paper and the test result, is due by the end of one month after the programme is held, countersigned by the coordinator (Scheme Document, section VII).

The Pune sanction described above tightened this for online conduct. It required a statement of expenditure audited by a chartered accountant firm quoting its registered membership number, and the utilisation certificate along with any unspent balance and interest accrued within 21 days of completing the programmes, with a separate report and a separate statement of expenditure for each programme even where one combined certificate covered them all (ISTE sanction letter of 9 October 2020, filed in a college NAAC self-study report). That was addressed to one institute and is not a published amendment to the rulebook, but it is the closest thing on record to a worked example of the closing bundle.

Step by step

How to apply

The route runs through ISTE, not through a general grants window. An institute submits a proposal to ISTE with the processing fee paid, ISTE issues an offer letter if the proposal clears, the institute returns an acceptance letter, and the first instalment follows that acceptance (Scheme Document, sections II and VII). The sanction letter that finally authorises the programme is signed on both sides, by the Executive Secretary of ISTE and the Director of AICTE's Faculty Development Cell, going by the one such letter that has been put into the public record by its recipient (ISTE sanction letter of 9 October 2020, filed in a college NAAC self-study report).

The myScheme entry files the application mode as online and then prints no application link, and the reason for that gap is historical. An online proposal window did exist. In November 2017 ISTE's Executive Secretary wrote to the Council's RIFD advisor to report that the portal inviting proposals for these programmes had gone up on the ISTE website, and asked for the link to be carried on AICTE's own site as the memorandum of association required; AICTE still keeps that letter among its published files (ISTE letter to AICTE on the online proposal portal). The address inside it is a bare numeric one on an old ISTE server rather than a named page, and it no longer returns a proposal form. The portal ISTE points institutes to today is its faculty development programme portal at fdp-membership.isteonline.in, which handles the self-financed line (ISTE, Self-Finance STTPs and FDPs).

Tracking, then, is done by correspondence. The artefacts that tell an institute where it stands are the ISTE offer letter, its own acknowledged acceptance, and the sanction letter, each of which names a date and a programme title; AICTE publishes no dashboard on which a proposal number can be looked up. ISTE's Executive Secretary is the addressee for that correspondence, and the society publishes two working email addresses for it, istedhq@isteonline.org and technical@isteonline.org (ISTE, Self-Finance STTPs and FDPs). A teacher tracking a seat has a shorter path, because the host college controls the participant list: registration, selection and the certificate all sit with the coordinator named on the brochure.

How winners are picked

Selection process

A proposal is assessed by a three member committee of experts, none below the rank of Associate Professor (Scheme Document, section VI). The criteria the committee applies are listed in the document and are mostly about capability and history rather than novelty: whether the programme matches the aims set out in the memorandum of understanding, whether a self-financing programme was run in the previous twelve months, whether the course content is relevant, whether the facilities and expertise exist on campus, whether industry or another institution is collaborating, and how the institute performed on earlier programmes. The document adds one line that reads like a deliberate correction of bias, stating that the programme should be allotted to all types of institutes provided the proposal is found satisfactory (Scheme Document, section VIII A).

Participant selection is the coordinator's job and is bounded by the batch rules already set out, which are geographic as much as academic. Capping any single district at half the batch is what stops a sponsored programme from becoming a staff meeting with a certificate.

Fine print

Terms & conditions

Three conditions decide whether a sanctioned programme survives contact with reality. Any change to the schedule, the coordinator, the venue or the dates needs prior approval from the Council, and the document is blunt about the consequence of skipping that step: the offer of grant already issued would be treated as automatically withdrawn. If the event is cancelled, the funds go back to ISTE immediately with interest accrued. And the overall expenditure may not exceed the sanction, whatever the sub-caps allow (Scheme Document, section VII).

After the event, ISTE carries out an impact analysis of each programme and submits a consolidated report to AICTE, which is why the closing bundle is as heavy as it is. The course material obligation runs both ways: the institute sends two bound copies of the material developed during a refresher programme to ISTE with the utilisation certificate and gives each participant a copy free of cost, while ISTE designs and develops the standard course material for the orientation side and has AICTE approve it before use (Scheme Document, sections VII and VIII D).

Get help

Contact

The scheme document names no officer and prints no helpline, so the contact points come from the two bodies themselves. AICTE's Faculty Development Cell is the owner on the Council's side, at Nelson Mandela Marg, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi 110070 (AICTE, Faculty Development Cell). ISTE publishes the Executive Secretary's office at Shaheed Jeet Singh Marg, near Katwaria Sarai in New Delhi, with istedhq@isteonline.org and technical@isteonline.org as the working addresses (ISTE, Self-Finance STTPs and FDPs). A teacher chasing a seat should write to the programme coordinator at the host college instead; neither headquarters maintains the participant list.

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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