Plea to ban new engineering colleges in January

COIMBATORE: States, which are home to hundreds of engineering colleges, have communicated to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) not to grant approval for new technical institutions for the academic year 2012-13.The list includes Tamil Nadu. However, the apex regulatory body for technical education is unable to act on the requests as the communication is not backed with statistics and justification for not allowing new players. “We will now take a decision on this only in January 2012 after obtaining scientifically studied report from various State governments by the end of the year,” AICTE Member Secretary K P Isaac said here on Friday.“Some States wrote to us saying they do not need new engineering colleges, as already a high number of seats were lying vacant. But, we cannot take a decision, unless it was substantiated by a detailed study,” he said.Isaac was here to address an AICTE conducted workshop on the online approval process for technical institutions for 2012-13 at the PSG College of Technology. “Around 45 days ago, the AICTE had written to all State Higher Education Secretaries requesting them to conduct a scientific study on the number of engineering colleges and students’ enrollment and accordingly make recommendations for freezing permission for new institutions,” he said.Tamil Nadu had last year itself wrote to the agency on this as the State has close to 500 engineering colleges, whereas the demand was far too less. Meanwhile, at the workshop Isaac said that last year the AICTE had refused to extend the approval for around 100 institutions in the country as they failed to rectify deficiencies.The regulatory body had issued show cause notices to over 1,000 technical institutions of which nearly 900 acted quickly and plugged the leaks. In the southern region, of the 1,150 institutions around 100 have failed to furnish mandatory details online. Isaac assured that the All India Council for Technical Education would complete the approval process by March 31 so that classes for the next academic year begin on time. He appealed to colleges to submit all relevant data for obtaining approval before the year-end. AICTE Advisor M K Hada, AICTE Southern Region Chairman R Rudramoorthy, South Regional Officer M Sundaresan and Vice Chancellors of the Anna University of Technology (Coimbatore and Madurai) K Karunakaran and R Murugesan respectively participated.