70 percent engineering colleges are in just four states: December 17, 2007 New Delhi: Pointing out that 70 percent of the country's engineering colleges are located in only four states, Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh on Monday called for removing regional disparities in the availability of technical education. "There is a wide discrepancy in the capacity between the states with over 70 percent of the capacity in degree-level engineering education being available in the four states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra," Arjun Singh said in a statement at a technical education conference here. "This regional imbalance has to be minimised so that people from all parts of the country have a fairly equal access to quality education. "Public-private partnership, in this regard, may also be desirable. While we do so, we must ensure that opportunities of quality technical education are provided to all, equitably," he added. The minister said if India has to assume leadership and realise its dream of becoming a super-power in the near future then "we have to ensure that the abundant talent available in the form of human resource is efficiently honed and tapped". Planning commission member B. Mungekar read out Arjun Singh's speech, as the minister could not make it to the conference organised by the All Indian Council of Technical Education (AICTE). The intake capacity of the Indian technical education system has increased manifold over the years. As on July 31, this was 627,082 students in the 1,617 AICTE-approved undergraduate degree engineering institutions. There were 333,296 students in the 1,403 diploma institutions, 104,084 students in the 1,150 management institutions, 56,004 students in the 999 MCA institutions and 44,476 students in the 736 pharmacy degree institutions. Similarly, there were 4,707 students in the 116 architecture institutions and 650 students in the nine fine arts institutions making a grand total of 842,068 students in 4,707 technical institutions. Speaking at the conference, Mungekar said the knowledge economy is one of the several ingredients for achieving 11th Five-Year Plan target of 9 percent GDP growth. This can be done by making education affordable to masses and not by bypassing the poor or ignoring the backward regions of the country, not even backward regions of the developed states in India, he emphasised. Mungekar said; "Our educational system is suffering from many impediments like lack of employability of the graduates, subject imbalance, lack of expansion, lack of faculty development, lack of networking of institutions, lack of regular upgradation of curriculum and lack of faculty exchange programme." IANS
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