REVITALIZING THE QUALITY CIRCLE APPROACH FOR IMPROVING QUALITY OF TECHNICAL INSTITUTES IN INDIA

Quality Improvement in technical education system in India is still an important and challenging issue. Imparting quality in the services sector like education is the foremost demand of the country as India is generating potential technical manpower not only for the nation but for the whole world. The rapid growth in the technical education sector in the last two decades in India has highlighted the need to focus on quality improvement. QC (Quality Circle) approach is most effective approach as it is the initiative taken by the local committees formed by the concerned local persons. By owning the problems of Institution by QC members, the probability of timely achieving objective increases by many folds. QC members work voluntarily for the Institute specific needs and issues. It is a closed loop approach that is to take up the problems and issues and work out solutions locally thereby giving better results in terms of high quality assurance for all stake holders of technical education system. Earlier many efforts have been taken for the quality improvement through the QC in the Industrial sector however it is less explored by the educational Institutes. In view of the above Government of India in association with QCI (Quality Council of India) decided to renew its efforts for the improvement of the Quality in the technical education by adopting innovative and fresh approach through master trainer programme. The master trainers were identified from the four NITTTR (National Institute of Technical Teachers' Training and Research), India and were trained by the QCI in the month of March 2013. The purpose of this project was to improve the quality in the technical education through the teachers. The master trainers are providing training to the teachers of the Polytechnic Institutes all over India for the improvement in the technical education sector. This paper describes the quality circle approach with new perspective for the total quality improvement of the technical Institutes specific to polytechnic Institutes in India. The major components of this paper are QC model for technical Institutes, challenges, resistance to quality improvement, major steps taken-up for the improvement and significant outcomes. The author has trained 20 faculty members of various polytechnics of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh states of India and experiences of these teachers is reflected as a result of this approach. The teacher's input related to various local problems, issues and common points for quality improvement are considered as sample input for the approach and the experiences are collected as output for deriving the conclusion of this paper.