It looks like the All-India Council for Technical Education’s(AICTE) decision to conduct a single entrance examination for engineering admissions across the country from 2013 onwards will not be implemented.
Though the council passed the regulation to conduct a single entrance examination for engineering admissions, no further steps have been taken. The decision is yet to reach the implementation level. But the common entrance examination will be conducted for the national institutes.
“The council has passed the regulation but it has not reached the implementation level and it is too late to conduct the common entrance examination for the engineering admissions in 2013. It will be limited to the national institutes like the IITs and IIITs,” said AICTE member secretary K P Isaac. Though the Ministry of Human Resource Development had proposed a common entrance examination from 2013, it was not mandatory and was left to the states’ decision.
Though Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Assam were in favour of the proposal, Kerala had opposed it and decided to conduct its own entrance examination. Now, about 150 engineering entrance examinations are being conducted in the country. The majority of the engineering colleges in the state are being run in the self-financing sector and the management associations are in favour of a common entrance examination. Even the opinion leaders and educationists across the state favour a common entrance examination as the students can exploit the opportunities at the national-level.