‘AICTE eager to boost enrolment in core engg courses’

Mysuru: Member-secretary of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Rajeev Kumar on Sunday expressed concern over diminishing interest among students to pursue civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering programmes. He said that AICTE, having taken cognisance of this problem, was trying to address this shortcoming by introducing these topics as ‘minor’ subjects in engineering programmes. Kumar expressed satisfaction with the results of this initiative undertaken by the AICTE, as evidenced by the spurt in admissions to core engineering programmes in 2022-23 academic year.
Kumar, participating in the valedictory of the 10th International Conference on Transformations in Engineering Education’, organised by Vidyavardhaka College of Engineering, in association with the Indo-Universal Collaboration for Engineering Education in Mysuru, said that AICTE had transformed itself from being a regulatory body to a facilitating one. It was striving to empower 10,000 institutions, to ensure they imparted quality education to future engineers. Pointing out that the technical landscape was fast-changing, the AICTE secretary exhorted teachers to adapt to this dynamic environment.
AICTE had launched a programme for training engineering teachers, wherein they had to complete eight modules, in addition to a month-long internship, and a year-long apprenticeship under senior teachers. “Thus far, 40,000 teachers had completed the course,” Kumar said.
Gopalkrishna Joshi, executive director of Karnataka State Higher Education Council, proclaimed that education had the power to usher in a transformation, besides contributing to society’s socio-economic development. He stressed the need for greater collaboration to transform engineering education.
President of Vidyavardhaka Sangha, Gundappa Gowda was among those in attendance at the event.