NEW DELHI: Two years after its application for provisional membership in the Washington Accord was rejected for want of sponsors, India is all set to approach the 18-year-old grouping next week with a fresh application seeking recognition for its engineering programmes accredited by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE).

This time round, the U.K., Canada and Australia are backing India's inclusion in the Washington Accord. Signed in 1989, the Washington Accord is an agreement between bodies responsible for accrediting professional engineering degree programmes in each of the signatory countries. It recognizes the substantial equivalency of programmes accredited by those bodies, and recommends that graduates of accredited programmes in any of the signatory countries be recognized by the other countries as having met the academic requirements for further study or employment.

This will facilitate greater movement of Indian engineering graduates; particularly to the developed countries as the signatories are bound to "make every reasonable effort to ensure that the bodies responsible for registering or licensing professional engineers to practice in its country or territory accept the substantial equivalence of engineering academic programs accredited by the signatories to the agreement". Though products of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have made it big in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. - courtesy the brand name - each is a stand-alone case.

Till date, there are 10 signatories to the Accord: Australia, Canada, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, the U.K. and the U.S. Besides, Germany, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan have provisional signatory status. At this year's meeting in Washington next week, India is among three applicants for provisional signatory status; the other two being Sri Lanka and Russia.

The AICTE had put up an application for provisional membership at the last biennial meeting of the signatories in Hong Kong in 2005.

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