AICTE to cut 600000 seats in engineering colleges to focus on quality

Colleges across the country are shutting down courses in technical subjects such as engineering even as India’s apex technical education regulator, the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), looks to stem a decline in the quality of such education, according to a report in Livemint. Last year, three engineering collages had closed down. He also said engineering colleges will not be forced to shut down and the regulatory body will “ensure that students are not at the receiving end”.

Presently, Telangana has 1,50,000 seats and AP has 1,45,000 seats ahead of admissions this year. “Authorities, especially AICTE, need to be strict with such institutions so that only serious players stay in the space and quality does not get hampered”, Parepadan said, adding that the situation in Kerala is bad and that some several thousand engineering seats this year are lying vacant. Odisha also suffers from problem of plenty as out of 1.5 lakh seats in technical institutions, just 88,000 have been filled in the State. In fact, in 2011, Nasscom, the trade association of IT and business processing units, had estimated that only 25% of India’s IT engineering graduates were actually employable. In an official report, an education assessment company Aspiring Minds said that the employability of engineering graduates in various states ranges between 12% and 42%. “The capacity should come down for the betterment of all-students, education providers and employers”, chairman of AICTE Anil Sahasrabudhe was quoted by Live Mint. Only 7.49% are employable in core engineering jobs like mechanical, electronics and civil engineering.

The quality of engineering graduates from the colleges have been questioned earlier by many leading companies and MNC’s.

Intake capacity of engineering programmes has gone up exponentially from 1.85 lakh undergraduate engineering seats in 2000 to 16.73 lakh now. The AICTE chairman said apart from the issue of quality, students were not keen to study in remote parts of the country.

As a engineer, student or aspirant, we do know that unless an engineering college, course and seats are certified by AICTE, they are not valid. There were at least 1422 applications received by the council this year which demanded permission to shut down their institutes.