Technical education institutions in India will soon have internships as a mandatory requirement for the award of degrees.
The All-India Council for Technical Education — the regulator for maintaining norms and standards in technical education — has set the ball rolling to make internships a mandatory part of technical education in the country.
“For a beginning, we are asking institutions providing technical education to arrange for internships for 75% of their students. We will also help by trying to get industry bodies and MSMEs on board for this. The institutions can then contact these bodies to facilitate internships,” said a senior official of the AICTE who did not wish to be named. “Once we get this process streamlined, we will in about three years make internships a mandatory requirement for the award of degrees.”
In other words, while the onus would first be on the technical educational institutions to put in place systemic arrangements to facilitate internships, it would soon transform into a regime where the onus would also be on the students to intern somewhere to become eligible for the degree. “The final vision is to ensure that those who pass out have interned and thus have experience of industry pace and requirements,” an official said.
Vast purview
The purview of the AICTE is vast: it covers programmes of technical education, including training and research, in engineering, technology, architecture, town planning, management, pharmacy, applied arts and crafts, hotel management and catering technology, etc.
The Ministry of Human Resource Development – under which the AICTE is an autonomous institution – has also been in the loop regarding this change.
Internships, it is felt, would make the students more industry-ready, providing a set of hands-on skills and experience of the work environment in the industry to complement their academic and theoretical insights into their discipline.
