The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Panel to monitor engineering colleges

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Aug 28, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Panel to monitor engineering colleges

By Our Special Correspondent

VISAKHAPATNAM, AUG. 27. The State Government will constitute a technical advisory committee (TAC) to monitor the functioning of engineering colleges.

Announcing this here today, the Minister for Technical Education, Nayani Narasimha Reddy, said that the committee would inspect a few colleges every three or four months to find out the quality of education imparted, whether they had good faculty or not or whether they violated the norms, and recommend to the All-India Council for Technical Education for suitable action.

"The Chief Minister, Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, is planning to constitute the committee at the earliest. We should ensure that quality education is imparted as only a few are going abroad for jobs," he said. Reeling out statistics, he disclosed that there were 234 engineering colleges with 79,550 seats, 51 B. Pharma and 52 D. Pharma colleges with 3,000 seats each, 215 MBA colleges with 13,080 seats and 268 MCA colleges with 14,360 seats. Besides, there were seven colleges offering architectural engineering course with 234 seats, 82 Government ITIs and 437 private ITIs with over one lakh seats.

No more engg. colleges

Asked whether more engineering colleges would be set up, the Minister felt that might not be necessary since the seats in many engineering colleges, particularly in the rural areas, remained unfilled. In Rangareddy and Hyderabad districts alone there were as many as 43 colleges, he pointed out. "There are requests for cancelling the counselling process but we are persisting with it to provide transparency and avoid malpractices in admission," he said.

Mr. Reddy also said that new courses were being introduced in the ITIs to suit the rural needs and help the youth in self-employment. Those who completed ITI courses were finding it difficult to secure apprenticeship, with many of the public sector undertakings being closed down, he said, and explained that the new courses needed no apprenticeship for jobs.

Telangana issue

Asked whether he would strive for the development of Telangana as a member of the Telangana Rashtra Samaithi (TRS), he clarified that as a Minister he would work for the State's progress. There would be no discussion on the Telangana issue at the Cabinet level and the separate Telangana state could be achieved only through Parliament, he pointed out.

It was only under pressure from the AICC president, Sonia Gandhi, and the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, that the TRS had agreed to join the Cabinet in the State and Central Governments, he claimed.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Andhra Pradesh