Two engineering colleges from Western region have bagged the Diamond and Silver awards for best industry-institute linkages in the first-ever all-India survey conducted by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII).
PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, bagged the first place, while Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, got the third slot.
The colleges have been recognised as the best industry-linked institutions from among 156 AICTE-approved engineering institutions in the country in the “AICTE-CII Survey of Industry-linked Engineering Institutions”, launched on June 7 this year. The second position went to College of Engineering, Pune.
The AICTE conducted the voluntary survey to “map best practices being followed by institutions and industry in six streams, to recognise them and to create a benchmark of quality education in the country”. This was to find out the current status of the industry linkages in the country. The results are to show where an institution stands, according to AICTE Chairman S.S. Mantha.
The results of the survey were announced at the AICTE-CII University-Industry Congress – Fourth Global Higher Education Summit held on November 8 in New Delhi. Union Minister of State for Human Resource Development Shashi Tharoor gave away the awards.
Among the total five awards given away on the occasion, PSG College of Technology bagged three awards.
Besides the overall ranking, the best engineering stream award went to the college’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the best faculty award went to the Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department P.V. Mohanram. Purses worth Rs. 5 lakh, Rs. 2 lakh, and Rs. 1 lakh, besides trophies and citations were given away under each category. Though there were awards for six engineering streams and 18 awards for faculty under the six engineering streams, only one each was found eligible to receive the award.
R. Rudramoorthy, Principal of PSG College of Technology, says the visiting team of judges rated the college based on the seven parameters. “It is a moment of pride for the college for having been rated first in industry-institute linkages. The mechanical stream came first in the category. We are working on areas in other streams so that these too excel in the next survey,” he says.
A.M. Natarajan, Chief Executive Officer of Bannari Amman Institute, says the committee visited seven short-listed colleges to select the top three.
“The exercise involved a detailed survey of industry linkages based in seven parameters such as governance, curriculum, faculty, infrastructure, services, placements and entrepreneurship.
To keep the bar high, a minimum threshold score of 60 per cent was set for institutions to qualify. For a 16-year old self-financing college, it is a great achievement. This is a motivation for us to do better,” he says.
The AICTE will make the survey an annual exercise to ensure that the quality was maintained by institutions.
It also plans to take it forward by extending it to management, architecture, and pharmacy colleges.
A report of the survey, highlighting the case studies of the top three colleges, was released at the summit “so that other institutions could derive the best practices from the leaders.” It also shows that “despite the overall lacklustre performance of institutions on industry linkages, there are some who have been able to get it right.”
