Minister blames mushrooming of private colleges for falling standards of education

Updated on: Thursday, September 06, 2012

Maharashtra Rural Development Minister Jayant Patil lamented falling standards of education in colleges and blamed this on unbridled growth of private engineering and management institutions.

He said colleges not imparting quality education should be shut down.

"A trend has emerged to start private engineering and management colleges. These colleges come up even though they lack the necessary capacity and infrastructure to provide quality education. Government should inspect such colleges and shut down those not having required facilities to impart quality education," he said.

Patil was speaking after presenting awards to teachers at SNDT College here on the occasion of Teacher's Day.

These colleges are only fooling students and their parents in the name of education, the Minister said.

Maintaining that Government money should not be utilised to run such colleges, he said, "Rajesh Tope (Higher and Technical Education Minister) should undertake a campaign to shut bogus and sub-standard colleges."

Patil advised Tope, who was also present at the award function, to come out with white paper to find out whether crores of rupees spent by Government to fund research works is being properly used.

"Thousands of crores are spent by Government to fund research works. But how much it is benefiting us? We are lagging behind in research. We did research on BT cotton, but what about other research works."

Stating that USA was way ahead of India in research and development, he said experimentation can increase farm production in the country. "Ours is an agrarian country, but there has not been enough research in agriculture.

Minister blames mushrooming of private colleges for falling standards of education

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