Touts in Technical Education

Most private engineering colleges in MP on verge of closure

NK SINGH

 

The 200 odd private engineering colleges in Madhya Pradesh are staring at a bleak future. A sharp fall in the number of students seeking admission to these colleges is threatening their survival. It has led to frayed nerves among touts who run the racket of manipulating admissions. In Bhopal, home to half the engineering colleges in the State, goons have taken to street their fight over shrinking size of spoils. This week an armed gang of touts attacked an engineering student following a dispute over ‘commission’ paid for  admissions. The incident led to hospitalisation of the battered student, a police case and exposed the dirty underbelly of technical education in MP.

As desperate managements of these institutions fight over each student, weird things are happening on academic landscape. A group of engineering colleges is known to have engaged about 100 telecallers to lure students. The touts are making mouth-watering offers. “Some colleges,” said the owner of a college that is barely able to keep its nose over water, “are poaching students by reducing the fee to as little as Rs 10,000.” The official fee structure, fixed by the government, hovers around Rs 70,000 per annum. Touts haunt the few colleges that usually attract more students due to better reputation, ready to pounce upon unsuspecting parents and students who come for admissions.

It has been recognised for a few years now that engineering colleges in MP suffer from over-capacity. There are more seats than students and admissions have been showing a southward trend. At the beginning of this decade about 90,000 aspirants used to jostle for 70,000 seats in engineering courses in the State. This year there are only 20,000 wannabe engineers in MP, which has to offer about 71,000 seats. Although colleges have been surrendering their capacity, which had reached once more than a lakh admission at its peak, seats are going abegging. Every fifth engineering college in MP has achieved the dubious distinction of zero admission this year.

Sixteen colleges have closed down till now, five of them this year alone. Many more are planning to follow suit. About 75 engineering colleges, unable to bear mounting losses, have been put on the block, says a person close to development. Particularly under stress are those who had borrowed heavily for creating infrastructure required to open engineering colleges. It needs a minimum investment of Rs 20 crore to start a college. A distressed college recently approached the owner of a flourishing education group to negotiate a deal. Within a week, his offer price came down from 70 crore to 50 crore. “Most are willing to sell at cost price, but there are few takers,” said the owner of the education group. One desperate owner approached an architect recently, hoping to convert his college into a water resort park!

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was not off the mark when he suggested recently that engineering colleges that are not doing well should start the facility to start industrial training institutes. “What is the use of such engineering colleges when youngsters who pass out remain unemployed,” he said. He was acknowledging the bitter fact that these colleges in MP are churning out inferior, unemployable product.

That is true. It is also true that the basic responsibility for it lies at the doorsteps of greedy college owners. Sensing an opportunity to make a quick buck, they went in for a mushroom growth without proper faculty or necessary facilities like labs. There is no linkage between industry and academics. The curriculum offered by these institutions is outdated in a fast-changing world of technology.  Only two colleges from MP, MANIT and IIT Indore, figure in the ranking of top 100 engineering colleges in the country. No wonder, of the 71,000 students who graduated from MP in 2015, only 15 per cent could get jobs.

But can the government absolve itself of responsibility for this mess?  Are not they also equally responsible for mushroom growth? The regulatory authorities failed to check whether the colleges had proper faculty or functional labs to train a modern technocrat. The technical education department could have, and should have, teamed up with the industry department to foster a link between industry and educational institutions for on the job training. It failed to do so.

Minister of State for Technical Education, Deepak Joshi, wants the colleges to teach engineering in Hindi. “It will be disastrous because English was the strong point of our engineering graduates in global market,” said the owner of a college, who is himself an engineering graduate and who has trained and worked abroad. Replacing English with Hindi in technical education will lead to further dilution of quality instead of making it more stringent. Madhya Pradesh was never known for imparting quality education. This will be its final death knell.

My column, Powers That Be, in DB Post dated 6 August 2017

 (Email: nksexpress@gmail.com. Tweets @nksepxress)