NEW DELHI: Select engineering colleges in the country may be allowed in the next session to add seats in emerging streams such as artificial intelligence and machine learning even though a ban on approving new engineering institutions or more seats in the existing ones will continue.
A government panel is set to submit by the end of this month its final recommendations on new streams, senior officials in the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) said.
Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the AICTE, told this newspaper that the council had asked the panel headed by BVR Mohan Reddy, chairman of the IIT-Hyderabad board of governors, to suggest specific areas in which engineering colleges can be permitted to start new courses or add more seats.
“We are expecting the final recommendations by December-end,” Sahasrabudhe said, adding that following the recommendations, the council will consider the applications by engineering colleges.
Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan this week told Parliament that in the wake of low enrolments in engineering courses, Reddy in its interim report had recently suggested continuing with the moratorium on new engineering colleges.
The Reddy committee, in its report in 2019, observed that capacity utilisation in 2017-18 at the UG and PG levels was 49.8 % (intake capacity vs enrolment) and recommended that no new seats be approved by AICTE starting from 2020 academic year.