The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has opened four schemes under its Institutional Development Cell (IDC) for the 2026-27 academic year, putting fresh focus on hands-on innovation, modern laboratory infrastructure and quality mentoring for technical institutions across the country.
AICTE Chairman Prof. Yogesh Singh launched the schemes in the presence of Member Secretary Prof. Shyama Rath. The four initiatives are the IDEA Lab scheme, Modernisation and Removal of Obsolescence (MODROBS), Margdarshan, and the Grant for Organising Conference (GOC).
What the four schemes cover
IDEA Lab: Short for Idea Development, Evaluation and Application, the scheme supports labs in AICTE-approved institutions where students apply STEM fundamentals through learning by doing, prototyping and product visualisation, giving engineering campuses a dedicated space for experimentation beyond the classroom.
MODROBS: The scheme helps institutions replace outdated equipment and upgrade laboratories, workshops and computing facilities for teaching, training and research. According to AICTE’s scheme guidelines, support goes up to ₹20 lakh per project over two years, with a dedicated window for institutions in rural areas, the North Eastern Region and Jammu and Kashmir.
Margdarshan: Under this mentoring model, a well-established AICTE-approved institute acts as a hub that guides up to ten nearby institutions towards National Board of Accreditation (NBA) accreditation and better NIRF performance. Senior academicians can also be nominated as individual mentors, or Margdarshaks, to work with beneficiary institutes.
Grant for Organising Conference: GOC supports institutions in hosting conferences that encourage academic exchange and knowledge sharing among faculty, researchers and students.
Reaching institutions beyond the metros
AICTE said the schemes are meant to widen participation, including from institutions in districts across the country, and to make access to development funding more equitable for technical colleges. The council expects the package to strengthen India’s technical education ecosystem by supporting innovation, infrastructure upgrades and collaboration between institutions.
Why it matters
For many engineering colleges and polytechnics, especially outside large cities, ageing labs and thin computing infrastructure remain a real barrier to teaching emerging areas such as AI, data science and advanced manufacturing. Funding for lab modernisation and maker-style IDEA Labs, paired with accreditation mentoring, gives these institutions a practical route to upgrade both what they teach and how they are assessed. How quickly the 2026-27 calls translate into sanctioned projects on the ground will be the measure to watch.
Institutions can find scheme documents and application details on AICTE’s institutional development schemes page.
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