JOIN USTechnical institutes, functioning with less than 30% enrollment for the last five years, will face a cut in their approved intake by 50% from this year.
The AICTE has brought in a provision to reduce the intake of such institutions in its revised rules for the grant of approval to the technical programmes of the universities and colleges.
The reduction in the approved intake will apply to each of the programmes in the institute.
The AICTE decision comes at a time when a large number of technical institutes, mostly private, are witnessing a significant gap in the demand and supply.
Over half of the total engineering seats at 3,357 government and private technical institutes remained vacant in 2016-17 across the country, according to the statistics with the Ministry of Human Resource Development.
While at least 380 government engineering colleges could not fill 25% seats last year, a whopping 54% seats remained vacant at the private engineering colleges operating in different parts of the country.
In Karnataka, 28% of the total engineering seats remained vacant in 2016-17. Private engineering colleges in the state end up filling up just 46% of their seats on an average after completion of the admission process.
Against the sanctioned intake of 1,00,776, private engineering colleges in Karnataka could fill a total of 71,601 seats. Government engineering colleges in the state admitted 10,032 students against the sanctioned intake of 11,875.
To address the demand and supply gap issue, the AICTE had written to all the state governments last year to conduct a review and submit a request to the council in case they needed more technical colleges in their respective states to meet the demand.
"Many states, including Maharashtra, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, have sent their responses, saying that they do not need any new engineering colleges," official sources said.
DH News Service