The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has granted approval to the managements of 18 institutions to offer Masters in Business Administration from the new academic year (2009-10). In addition, it has sanctioned three institutions which will offer Masters in Computer Applications (MCA) and two pharmacy colleges.

“The self-financing MBA colleges will come up in Coimbatore, Madurai, Trichy, Salem, Nagapattinam, Namakkal, Erode, Thanjavur, Villupuram, Perambalur and Pudukkottai. The letter of intents for establishing these institutions were issued over the past two months,” a source in the AICTE said.

Consequently, the number of standalone management colleges in the state will go up to 34. In addition to these, 161 self-financing engineering and arts and science colleges in Tamil Nadu offer the MBA programme. While no government college offers MBA, a lone government-aided institution has 180 seats in its MBA course.

Similar to the United Kingdom, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to amend its Act (drawn up in 1987) to give approval to the one year MBA programme.Till date, only institutes offering a two-year Master of Business Administration (MBA) course were given the green signal. B-schools that started a one-year MBA course were considered “unrecognised” by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Despite this, prominent B-Schools like the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, Great Lakes School of Business, Chennai etc. offer a one-year full-time postgraduate programme in management. These institutions have been declared as unrecognized by the AICTE. Now, these institutes have applied to the AICTE for recognition.

As per guidelines released by AICTE for two years MBA Course, its obligatory for B- Schools to provide a minimum of 1,050 to 1,200 hours of classroom teaching. And it should be half ( 600 hours ) for colleges offering the year- long programme with a minimum of 100 hours spent on project work or industry based assignment.Apart from this, the student wanting to enrolled for the part time management courses will require work experience of a minimum of two years.