In the years beyond 2004, The Ministry had discovered, that the Council of Architecture (COA) had exercised “Certain Administrative and Financial functions” beyond those stipulated in the Architects Act, 1972 and it had issued advice to the COA.
But non-adherence to the advice of the Central Government in certain cases became the main factors responsible for the proposed legislation. However with change in Political leadership post 2014, all these proposals lapsed. Yet it is important to know the areas of focus of the COA.
On this page you will find a timeline, some commentary and some official records related to the proposed amendments. This information has been sourced from the Northern Chapter Records and the Rajya Sabha Archives.
This page is dynamic and gets constantly revised as and when the new information is obtained.
Proposed Amendments 2010
An Expert Group under the Chairmanship of Charles Correa that was set up by the Government in November, 2008 gave the following recommendations:
- Government should invoke the powers given to it under the act for the first two years under section 43 of the Act to issue order or advisory to the Council for taking remedial action to ensure that the rules and procedures laid down in the Act are being followed by the Council.
- It was suggested that the section 43(1) of the Act be deleted.
- It also recommended that a provision be created for setting up a “Commission of Inquiry” to look into allegations against the office-bearers and violations of the provisions of the Act and Rules/ Regulations on the lines of the Indian Medical Council Act, 1956 and the Dentists Act, 1942.
- An autonomous “Board of Architectural Education” consisting of representatives from the SPA, Architectural Profession, AICTE and the COA be set up. All decisions taken by Board should be final, not reversible by either AICTE or Council of Architecture.
But none of the recommendations of the “Expert Group” were incorporated in the proposed bill which was to be called ” 2010 Architect Amendment Bill”
The Architects (Amendment) Bill, 2010 as introduced in the Rajya Sabha on Aug 31, 2010 by Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister of Human Resource Development
The Architects (Amendment) Bill, 2010 was introduced in the Rajya Sabha on Aug 31, 2010. The Chairman, Rajya Sabha referred the Bill to the Committee on Sep 13,
2010 for examination and report within two months.
The committee adopted the report in 2011
Mr Bhalla was requested to Chair a committee to review the amendments proposed by COA and other related issues. The committee comprised of Ar Hafeez Contractor, Prof IJS Bakshi COA Nominee , Prof. N. Sridhar Director SPA Vijayavada , Ar. Prakash Deshmukh President IIA, Dr. Avinash Pant Vice-Chairman AICTE, Dr. Shakeel Ahmad nomiee UGC, Mr Rajesh Singh MHRD . This report was submitted to MHRD on Mar18, 2015.
On Jun16, 2016 MHRD wrote to The President COA to re-examine the report and comment on it. There is no information whether COA responded back.
Other Misc Documents
Consulting Engineers Association of India (https://www.ceai.org.in/ ) is an organization who had presented a counter opinion in favor of the engineers in 1968 and recently it had also published a document called annexure A wherein it had presented the Engineers point of view.