PG must for tech colleges

After engineering, MBA and MCA courses, the state is all set to witness a M.Tech and M.Pharmacy boom in 2010 with the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) making it mandatory for all engineering colleges, which completed four years of operation, to launch post graduate (PG) courses in engineering and pharmacy.

Of the total 657 engineering colleges in the state, nearly 350 colleges have completed four years. Each college is expected to get 70 PG seats resulting in an addition of 25,000 M.Tech seats. The state currently has 153 M.Tech colleges with an intake of 9,696 students, and 64 M.Pharmacy colleges with 1,350 seats.

Academics, however, ex-pressed concern that the move will create new problems as finding faculty for M.Tech courses would be difficult. They said the existing 153 colleges in the state are already reeling under a faculty crunch and it is impossible to get faculty for such a large number of colleges.

As per the AICTE norms, for every M.Tech programme, a professor with a PhD qualification should be appointed. Several M.Tech colleges are openly flouting the norms and appointing faculty without PhDs saying that the state has an insufficient number of professors who completed PhDs.

Though the AICTE has reportedly taken the decision to allow new M.Tech colleges to overcome the problem of faculty shortage for BE/B.Tech colleges, academics feel that such a decision will have an adv-erse impact on the engineering education in the state.