A total of 611 applications for setting up new engineering colleges in the country have been received, 20 of them from Andhra Pradesh, and a decision will be taken in the first week of March, according to the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Chairman S.S. Mantha.
He was here to participate in a seminar on redesigning engineering curriculum in the context of outcome-based education organised in JNTU-Kakinada on Sunday. He later told presspersons that accreditation for new engineering colleges would be strictly on the basis of outcome-based education system henceforth and that alone would lead to quality improvement.
He said there should be improvement in quality of students, teachers, infrastructure and everything to implement outcome-based engineering education. There should also be interface with industry and the point cannot be overemphasised, he added.
He said it was all right if many of the engineering colleges not having the basic infrastructure and faculty got closed down. “Let the best and fittest survive,” he said.
Industry mapping
Mantha said there should be industry mapping and “we can reap the demographic dividend only if we make our engineering graduates employable. Many studies have found that only 25 per cent of our engineering graduates are employable and the rest are getting absorbed in other sectors for low salaries. Therefore, there is a lot of underemployment.”
He said fees for engineering courses was being decided by State-level committees in different states and there is no national-level fee committee functioning right now. “I feel we should create some new financial model to make engineering education affordable to large sections of students in our country. Perhaps, we should take a relook at the dual fee system, which was in vogue in the past, with the rider that it should be linked to the economic status of the student’s family,” he said.
Education loans
Even though banks were liberally giving education loans to students, he said not many students were in a position to make use of them for various reasons and therefore other methods should be thought of, he added.
JNTU-Kakinada G. Tulasi Ram Das also spoke about the programmes taken up by the university.