AICTE to allow more student intake in colleges

According to the proposal by the regulatory body,new institutions would be allowed to increase their students intake from the very first year. Prabhat Kumar Sahoo,regional director of AICTE (western region) said,“Relaxing the norms would encourage more colleges to come up in mega and metro cities. Further increasing the intake would ensure more students get admissions into higher and technical institutions across the country.”

The AICTE had already passed a guideline reducing the land norm for the approval of institutes from 3 acres to 2.5 for mega cities. However,on Saturday the Union Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal at an International Conference on Higher education announced that the land norms would be relaxed further. “We want to encourage more colleges to come up which would help in creating more and more human resources. The changed guidelines would be soon in place,” Sibal said.

If the proposal is passed,engineering colleges would be able to increase the students intake to 300 from the existing 240. Institutes with MBA,MCA,Pharmacy and other post graduate diploma courses will be able to increase their seats to 120 from 60 and institutes of architecture can increase their students intake to 80 from 40.

Principal of Lokmanya Tilak college of Engineering,Navi Mumbai,Dr Vivek Sunnapwar said,“ AICTE is taking a very good step by relaxing the norms. Increasing the students intake will help a lot of students to get admissions in the city they live in. Besides a lot more colleges would come up if these norms are relaxed and students intake is increased.”

Dr KTV Reddy of Terna Engineering college said that allowing increase in students intake would give economic viability to these colleges.”I appreciate that AICTE is actually planning to enhance the rules of students intake. They must also allow existing colleges with good infrastructure to increase intake,” Dr Reddy said.