AICTE Rejects Engg &Mgmt College Tenders From 2014

Considering the requests of many states, AICTE (All India Council For Technical Education) has decided to reject fresh proposals of commencing new management and engineering colleges from 2014 due to a large number of seats lying vacant in several engineering and management colleges.

This decision was taken at a meeting of AICTE, which is responsible for approving the proposals for starting professional technical colleges. Sources from AICTE revealed that while various states had requested the council to reject the fresh proposals immediately, the process for establishing a new college such as purchasing land and constructing infrastructure begins 2 years before any college trust submits proposals to AICTE for permission.

For this the council has decided that for the next 2 years analyzing the current situation it may reject the proposals of all new professional technical colleges. After realizing the fact that the number of vacant seats in management and engineering colleges have increased significantly over the past 3 years, states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Haryana requested the council to stop accepting the fresh proposals.

At present there are 3393 engineering colleges in India with total intake capacity of 14.86 lakh and 3900 business schools with total intake capacity of 3.5 lakh. There are nearly 70% technical institutes in the states of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Last year after the admission procedure was closed, AICTE projected that about 3 lakh seats were vacant.

The AICTE has received 204 applications this year for starting new engineering institutes and 86 applications for opening management colleges. However, lesser number of applications is received from southern parts of the country. With the largest number of engineering colleges in India, Andhra Pradesh submitted only 8 proposals.

The council has received maximum number of applications from Maharashtra. This year about 307 applications received are for commencing polytechnic colleges. However, there is an overall decline in the number of fresh proposals received by AICTE. Two years ago the council received 2176 applications for commencing new colleges against 362 this year.

What might be the impact of this decision? Will intakes in other institutes increase ? But, still in the next two subsequent years the education industry may not see a lot of new technical and management colleges.