The All-India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), apex body on technical education, is actively considering reducing intake in engineering colleges by 30 per cent over next few years.
AICTE chairman Anil Saharsrabudhe here on Monday hinted that situation may improve marginally and finally settle at 70 per cent of total intake capacity as against filling up of little over 50 per cent of engineering seats across the country.
In last one year, 27,000 seats were slashed, the reduction in engineering seats could happen by approximately similar rate during next few years, he said. Last year, three engineering collages had closed down.
Mr. Saharsrabudhe, who was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of conference ‘Road Map on Technical Education in Odisha: Present and Future Perspectives,’ organised by Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) along with NIST, said AICTE was giving more emphasis on quality of engineering programmes at the time of giving approval for new educational institutions.
Intake capacity of engineering programmes has gone up exponentially from 1.85 lakh undergraduate engineering seats in 2000 to 16.73 lakh now. 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. The AICTE chairman said apart from the issue of quality, students were not keen to study in remote parts of the country.
Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik said: “With fast industrialisation and globalisation, the engineering and professional segments need to be treated differently to cater to the need for quality and skilled manpower. Along with quality faculty in technical education, the universities should take expeditious steps for revision of curriculum and syllabus with thrust on soft skill development, industry exposure and inter disciplinary studies.”
