COIMBATORE: The All India Council for Technical Education’s move of reducing faculty-students ratio has evoked strong opposition from the academic community. All India Private College Employees Union has filed an online petition requesting the Prime Minister to intervene and ensure faculty-students ratio not reduced.
The AICTE has reduced the faculty-students ratio, which the technical education institutions required to maintain, from the present one faculty for every 15 students to one faculty for every 20 students. This has attracted strong criticism from academic community, who fear that the quality of education will be hit.
Now, the All India Private College Employees Union founder KM Karthik has created an online petition urging the Prime Minister to intervene in this issue and ensure students-faculty ratio and quality of technical education is not diluted.
“AICTE had not cared for the Supreme Court judgement on economic harassment and other cruelties faced by professors in private engineering colleges. In the meantime, it introduced change in the faculty cadre ratio to 1:20, which will further demolish the main ‘infrastructure of human resource’ in engineering and technical education of India. The change in ratio from 1:15 to 1:20 means that students will far outnumber the professors,” Karthik said in his online petition, which has already received thousands of supports.
“By this, about one lakh qualified engineering professors, working under the existing 1:15 ratio, will be removed from their present employments in private/self financing engineering colleges all over India. Countries all over the world are aiming at reducing the ratio (increasing staff members strength) since the ratio is said to be the foremost factor in deciding quality of education from elementary schools to post doctoral levels,” he added.
“Because of this new ratio, lakhs of students will face the consequences of staff deprivation. On the other hand, existing staff may be threatened to work for less salary, else face job loss like their contemporaries sent out in the context of change in faculty-cadre ratio,” he argued.
“Many private colleges are only showing fake faculty during the inspection by AICTE and Anna University. AICTE only hears college managements and does not interact with faculty or students to understand the real problem,” Karthik told Express.
However, AICTE Chairman Anil D Sahasrabudhe defended the decision and said, “M K Kaw panel (which reviewed functioning of AICTE) in fact had recommended 1:20 and even upto 1:25. There is no dilution of quality and in fact the amount of work to be done by students and teachers will be same albeit a little more. Institutes were showing false names of teachers and increased numbers to get approval and now falsehood will have no place.”