Even as thousands of BE seats are falling vacant, the State government is planning to set up 20 more engineering colleges in the State.
The Technical Education Department has submitted a proposal to the government to start 20 government-run engineering colleges.
According to sources, earlier, the department had proposed to set up engineering colleges in 19 districts, as these districts did not have a single engineering college.
This proposal was tentatively accepted by the then coalition government. When Ramanagara and Chikkaballapur were considered as districts, the department proposed to set up colleges in these districts too. “Since Ramanagara already had an engineering college, we proposed to start one in Chikkaballapur,” sources said.
Courses
The proposed colleges will have four courses — mechanical, civil, electronics and computer science. The maximum intake for each course is 60.
In Karnataka, there are 29 districts, of which, eight districts were sanctioned engineering colleges this year. These districts include Chamarajnagar, Hassan, Krishnarajpet (Mandya), Ramanagara, Kushalanagar, Raichur, Haveri and Hoovinahadagali (Bellary).
Bangalore already has an engineering college. If the AICTE gives permission to start all the 20 engineering colleges, then the government will get 4,800 seats.
Adding these to 1,920 seats from eight engineering colleges, then the total seats available will be around 6,000.
In addition, the government gets 95 per cent of seats from aided colleges, which will be around 5,000 seats. The aided colleges are BMS College, Bangalore; Ambedkar Engineering College, Bangalore; NIE, Mysore; SJCE, Mysore; PES College, Mandya; Hassan Engineering College; BVB college, Hubli; BEC College, Bagalkot and PDA College, Gulbarga.
Next year, the government can expect over 11,000 seats from government and aided colleges alone. This year, about 32,000 seats were offered by the CET cell. And, they managed to fill up 29,000 seats, highest in the last few years.
However, the government colleges that were sanctioned this year did not receive good response from the students.
According to sources, about 1,920 seats were offered. Of these, 700 odd seats have remained vacant. Even as the government seats are falling vacant, will the new colleges get the students?
“Yes, we can fill up good number of seats as these are offered under nominal fee,” a government college principal said and added, “this year, the colleges were sanctioned at the end of the counselling and the students were not aware of them. Hence, the poor response.”