Select engineering colleges in the country may be allowed, in the next session, to add seats in emerging streams, such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, even though the ban on approving new engineering institutions or more seats in the existing ones will continue.
A government panel is set to submit its final recommendations on new streams by the end of the month, senior officials in the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) said. Anil Sahasrabudhe, Chairman of the AICTE, told TNIE that the Council had asked the three-year-old panel, headed by IIT Hyderabad's Board of Governor Chairman, BVR Mohan Reddy, to suggest specific areas in which engineering colleges can be permitted to start new or more seats.
Following the recommendations, the Council will consider the applications by engineering colleges. Earlier this week, in response to a question at the Parliament, Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that in the wake of low enrollments into the engineering and diploma programmes across India, Mohan Reddy, in his interim report, recently suggested to continue the moratorium on approving new engineering colleges, barring a few exceptions.
The Reddy Committee, in its report submitted in 2019, had observed that capacity utilisation in 2017-18 at the undergraduate and postgraduate level was 49.8% (intake capacity versus enrollment) and recommended that no new seats be approved by the AICTE starting from the academic year 2020. Following the recommendation, a ban on approving more colleges and new seats in the engineering sector was enforced from the 2020-21 academic session.
Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan also told the Parliament that the total approved intake in AICTE-approved engineering institutions has declined to 23.66 lakh seats in 2021-22, from 26.95 lakh seats in 2012-13. Meanwhile, in yet another move to ensure the quality of teaching, the country's technical education regulator is set to carry out the mid-course assessment of learning levels and employability of engineering and management students studying in institutes affiliated under it.
The initiative is part of the Student Learning Assessment project and has been started from the current academic session.This had come in the backdrop of the India Skills Report 2021 by various government and private agencies, including the AICTE, which showed that employability of India's youth has decreased to 45.9% with the percentage of highest employable talent in the age group of 18-21 years old, at 40%.