60% engineers remain unemployed: AICTE

NEW DELHI, MARCH 18 (ENA) According to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), 60 per cent of more than 8 lakh engineers who have graduated from technical institutions remain unemployed. It is learnt that less than 1 per cent of the engineering students take part in summer internships and around 15 per cent engineering programmes offered by more than 3,200 institutes are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA).

Seeing this trend, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) is planning to give India’s technical education a face lift.

The stratagem involves rolling out the single National Entrance Examination for Technical Institutions (NEETI) from January 2018, linking annual teacher training as a must for approval of the institution, mandatory induction training to enrolled students and annual revision of curriculum.

An MHRD official says, NEETI (for admission to engineering programmes) will be the first exam to be conducted by the National Testing Service (NTS), which will be completely computer-based. “In all probability, NTS will be ready by January 2018 to conduct the NEETI as well as National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for medical courses. The exams will be conducted multiple times in a year,” said the official. As planned, the first NEETI exam is likely to be scheduled for December 2017-January 2018, followed by another one in March 2018 and the third on May 2018.

The paper setting will continue to be with the IITs. Only the conduct of the exams will be NTS’s responsibility. The All India Council for Technical Education, under the HRD ministry, has also set broad targets for raising the standards of technical education, which includes immediate improvement of employability to 60% from the current 40%, and to ensure that 75% of the students get industry exposure in the form of summer internships.

According to the planned initiatives of the AICTE, the selection process will be based on the single entrance test by an agency authorised by the HRD ministry and there will be an injunction on conduct of such exams by any other institution or university or agency.

Henceforth, the institutions will have to make “suitable changes in the curriculum every year” and the process shall be completed in the month of December each year ahead of the coming academic year. AICTE has asked the institutions to formulate an action plan for executing these initiatives along with financial implications before June 2017.