AICTE to come out with a National Perspective Plan for technical education

Updated on: Monday, May 13, 2013

AICTE will come out with a National Perspective Plan for technical education, by which the pattern and requirements of courses and seats would be decided by collecting data from states, a top official said.

As there was problem in sanctioning new engineering colleges and closing of some colleges following less demand for courses and vacancies, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has sent a circular to state governments to send their perspective plans, so that a National plan could be brought out, S.S. Mantha Chairman AICTE said.

Stating that only Maharashtra has responded, "to some extent", Mantha said he was expecting other states to respond at least in another six months, so that a national plan could be brought out three months thereafter.

This would also help AICTE sanction colleges and courses according to the needs of the region and states, so that there would not be any closure of colleges and wastage of sanctioned courses, said Mantha who was here to participate in Graduation Day of PPG Institute of Technology and PPG Business School.

On President Pranab Mukherjee's observation on standards of higher education, the official said AICTE was taking steps to improve the quality of education and in another two to three years, the standards would definitely improve.

At a convocation at the Babsaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University in Lucknow, Mukherjee had emphasised the need for bringing several far reaching changes in the education system and for improving quality of higher learning.

A new scheme has been introduced by which students who wanted to pursue Ph.D., would be given a monthly scholarship of Rs. 16,000 in the first year and Rs. 18,000 in the second and third years, with a maximum of four years. Under this, students can pursue research in labs, be it National Laboratories, Engineering and Industry related or any other lab.

Moreover, AICTE has also set up 100 Quality Improvement Centres to help students during their research.It was also decided to have National Level Aptitude Phd test for students, so that they could be allotted topics as per their taste and would be given rank and merit, he said.

Mantha suggested a credible financial model to sustain education for youth, for possible adoption by the planners.

If a 100 students were trained in competency based skills, fifty a batch, thrice a week for three hours a day for 48 weeks in a year at least half a million would be trained every year with an increase of 5.3 points in General Enrolment Ratio, he said.

If each of these students, assumed poor, is provided Rs 50 a day to take care of travel and food for the period of the conduct of the programme, the grant required on account of this would be Rs 720 crore per annum, he said.

With an annual grant that may be provided to institutes that train these students amounting to Rs. 150 crore per annum, the total project cost could be estimated at Rs. 870 crore per annum, a small sum considering the employability potential of the scheme notwithstanding the political gains that accrued, he said.

This could even become a subset of the hugely successful scheme of MNREGA with yet untapped political gains as well, Mantha pointed out.

"Out of more than 12,000 institutions that we have in the technical education space, even if we select 5,000 under the community college framework as a subset of National Vocational Education Qualification Framework, for conduct of Vocational Education programme the opportunities were massive," he said.

AICTE to come out with a National Perspective Plan for technical education

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