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The India Habitat Centre building in Delhi, where the offices of the Indian Council of Architecture (CoA) are located.

The cause of the conflict between government and the Indian Council of Architecture runs far deeper than a few un-registered architects, as Deepali Nandwani uncovers.

The recent controversy involving the Indian Council of Architecture (CoA) and the Union Human Resource Development (UHRD) Ministry apparently began over a rather unexciting point of bureaucracy.

The Ministry, in a nationwide survey conducted last year, found that many Indian architects were functioning without licenses. Under the Architects Act, 1972, every architect has to register with the Council to work or practise in the country. The Ministry sent a warning note to the Council. The CoA subsequently sent notices to over 11,000 architects and stripped 9,800 of their architect tags.
 

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But there are signs that this was just a minor symptom of a much more serious issue – the jockeying for power over India’s architectural domain.
 
Many believe that the recent squabble lies in the CoA’s desire to recapture its role within the architectural agenda and the government’s efforts to obstruct them.

An insider says that the Council, which, under The Architects Act, 1972, is obliged to take government nominees on its board, has been fighting for more autonomy.

“There is a lot of pressure from the government. They not only want to take a call on appointing their own representatives, but even want to tell us who we should take on from the IIA and architectural institutions,” the insider says. “It hampers decision-making.”

As a result, the Council has been accused of blocking the renominations of various ministry officials to its board, despite a requirement to include elected and government-nominated representatives.

But from where does all this tit-for-tat quarrelling stem?
First of all, there are major concerns within the Council over how architecture is taught. According to the insider, the UHRD Ministry is looking to tighten its grip on architecture colleges.

It recently transferred the functions of regulating architecture education from the CoA to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which now regulates all technical education. The only mandate left with the CoA is to regulate the “profession of architecture.”

As a result, the architect community threw up its arms, not least because the CoA’s powers were cut not through a legislative amendment, but by terminating a decade-old arrangement that existed between the AICTE and CoA through a memorandum of understanding.

Now, it is the AICTE that decides whether a new architecture college can be set up, whether the approval granted to an existing college can be extended, and whether the number of students admitted in a particular college can be increased.