Freeze on new engineering institutes due to empty seats

The statutory body responsible for technical education in India has announced this week it will not permit new private engineering colleges from the academic year 2020-21, after years of complaints of poor quality and stagnant enrolment signalling a glut in the sector.

Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), which oversees the non-university sector, said only requests from existing specialised engineering institutes to either start programmes in new technologies or convert current capacity in traditional engineering disciplines (such as electrical and mechanical engineering) to emerging new technologies will be considered from next year as the country tries to upskill in new technologies.

The freeze on new engineering colleges is seen by many academics as a culmination of a series of measures introduced during the past few years to address the poor quality of technical education and vacancies, as the number of engineering institutes has burgeoned in the past decade, with engineering being a highly sought-after career path.

Around 3,300 engineering institutes in the country offer a staggering 1.55 million seats, but just 787,130 students enrolled in the 2016-17 academic year – the last year for which AICTE figures are available – which is a vacancy rate of 54%. Over the past five years, vacancies at AICTE-approved engineering institutes averaged 47%.

The lack of quality in engineering education is responsible for the sector’s decline in popularity. Job prospects for engineering graduates are also declining.

“India is producing a significant number of engineers every year and many of them are not able to find a job. A dream career choice has fallen out of favour,” explained BS Bhatia, former mechanical engineering department head at Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Unemployment high

Around 60% of graduates of such engineering institutes who graduated in 2017 remain unemployed, according to AICTE.

Academics say private engineering colleges have mushroomed in the past few years but are often poorly equipped, with poor infrastructure and laboratories, have a dearth of good faculty, with existing staff often lacking in technical competencies, and have no simultaneous industry exposure and no technical ecosystem to supplement classroom teaching.

This has led to low employability of graduates, with only those from premier engineering institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology still in demand. Poor quality education and outmoded curricula had become more obvious with increased automation and the restructuring of businesses to adapt to emerging new technologies, Bhatia explained.

“The lack of quality in engineering education is responsible for the sector’s decline in 1.5 million Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Technology seats available in engineering colleges all over the country in 2016-17. AICTE has been trying to fix this,” he told University World News.

The moratorium comes after a government committee headed by BVR Mohan Reddy, chairman of the board of governors of the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, advised AICTE to halt the creation of new engineering colleges. The committee urged AICTE to introduce undergraduate engineering courses only in advanced areas like artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics, quantum computing, data sciences, cybersecurity and 3D printing and design.

While the committee recommended no new engineering institutes should be set up from 2020, it said concessions should be made for applications already in the pipeline.

Past attempts to manage crisis-hit sector

Earlier, AICTE announced a reduction in the intake by half for engineering courses with poor admissions from 2018-19, and the total number of graduate and postgraduate engineering seats across all AICTE-approved colleges fell by nearly 167,000.

A few years back AICTE made the rules tougher to ensure a better quality of technical education. According to these rules, colleges that lacked proper infrastructure and reported less than 30% admissions for five consecutive years would have to be shut down.

Nearly 150 colleges have shut down voluntarily every year due to these stricter rules. Between 2014 and 2018 some 410 engineering colleges have shut, but AICTE has said more need to close.

Some attempts have been made to reform engineering education. Minister of State for Human Resource Development Dr Satya Pal Singh recently told India’s lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha, that to align the technical skill set of students more closely with industry requirements, AICTE had developed a more socially and industrially relevant model curriculum for undergraduate and postgraduate engineering studies.

It allows students to take electives from other disciplines and involves more internships in the final year to understand industry requirements, provide hands-on experience and to pursue project work relevant to industry, with individual institutions allowed flexibility to take into account the needs of local industries.

AICTE also made it mandatory for teachers at engineering institutes to undergo six months of training so that they can better train future engineers.