Aspirants to engineering and technical courses can breathe easy. The Madras High Court has ordered that Anna University and the All-India Council for Technical Education must ensure the quality of colleges under their purview.
On Wednesday, the court ordered the university and the council to publish a separate list of engineering colleges with similar or identical names along with the code numbers, apart from the information on the colleges, on their websites.
The court also permitted the council to initiate criminal and civil action against the university-affiliated colleges that have similar-sounding names. The two institutions have been directed to conduct periodic inspection of all the affiliated institutions and colleges.
University officials have maintained that they could not publish the pass percentage of colleges as it is a tedious process. They say some private websites with which the uiversity shares the data for the benefit of the 570 colleges affiliated to it could provide the details to analysts.
According to data provided by one such analyst, in a total of 78 colleges/institutes, the pass percentage was zero in the first semester exam held in January. The results were declared a few weeks ago. A senior university official, however, maintained that 50 per cent of the students who took the examinations had passed. The lack of such data has, however, prevented the students from making informed choices.
Every year, during counselling, college officials receive complaints. D. Sherin of Velicham, an NGO working in the area of higher education, said: “Last year, I guided three students who faced problems because of poor information about colleges. A girl from Krishnagiri had scored 981 marks and she had chosen an engineering college which had a name sounding similar to that of a well-known college. We took up the matter with Anna University but it said it couldn’t help her. Finally I got her a seat in an arts and science college at Krishnagiri itself.”
In another instance, a boy from Sivaganga sought to change the course after he realised that the college he had applied to did not have sufficient infrastructure. “I followed up these cases but Anna University officials told me that students should check the details about colleges before selecting them,” she added.
Education consultant Moorthy Selvakumaran says that now students can choose a college based on an important parameter instead of being awed by its infrastructure.
