Ahmedabad

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Prof. Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe today asserted that the regulatory authority of the technical institutes in the country should lie with the statutory body and various acts including the AICTE act should be amended for removing overlaps in this regard and bringing full clarity about it.

    Addressing a press conference here today he also said that due to huge mushrooming of technical institutes in the country a large number of seats ie over 8.5 lakh (47 percent) of a total of 16,90,000 seats in the 10,000 odd technical institutes remained vacant this year.

   To address this kind of problem a number of steps including the setting up of one or two planning institutes, introduction of  providing study material of other renowned faculties through online sources and prompting the bright B tech students to take up M-tech courses to address the issue of the acute shortage of faculties were being initiated.

The planning institutes to be established in two years time would make extensive study with regard to the changing needs and requirements to enable better planning for the number of seats in a particular stream during a given period for optimum utilization of the available resources, he said.

    To a query, the AICTE chairman said that a dispute regarding authority of technical institutes involving the university grant commission (UGC) was already being heard by the apex court which was through its interim orders allowing the council to retain the powers through its annual renewal of sorts.

   ‘In my view the regulatory authority should lie with the AICTE as its meant for the technical education. The main problem is the overlapping of authority in various acts including the AICTE act, the Pharmacy act and the Architecture atc. Such ambiguous and confusing things should be removed from the acts by means of amendment. It should be made pretty clear as to who holds the final authority over what. Once this kind of clarity is there the problem would be solved,’ Prof. Sahasrabudhe said.

    Underlining that the shortage of good faculties was a major constraint in the field of quality technical education in the country he said efforts were on to take care of it.

    Earlier the Chairman attended a programme in the Gujarat Technical University (GTU) in which he interacted with over 2 lakh students of the 486 affiliated institutes through google hangout and encouraged them to take up various entrepreneurial projects to be a job provider rather than a seeker.

– DeshGujarat