Tamil Nadu: AICTE to have placement portal for rural engineering colleges

CHENNAI: All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will launch a placement portal for engineering colleges in rural areas and semi-urban areas, for which more than 500 industries have agreed to be partners, said AICTE chairman T G Sitharam on Friday.

Speaking at a national conference - Leveraging Research Innovation and Digital Learning Technologies for Better Educational Inclusion - organised by Educational Promotional Society of India, Sitharam said, the council had created more than 2.5lakh internships in the last three months in the core engineering sector through a web portal.

He also emphasised not to close down core engineering departments due to lack of students. "Students are joining courses where the jobs are. Jobs are plenty in IT-related and financial areas. We have come up with an idea of offering minor degrees in emerging areas while keeping the core engineering intact.

In addition to the 160 credits, a civil engineering student or mechanical engineering student can do a minor in IoT or data science by getting additional 18 credits," Sitharam said.

"The Union government is also planning to come up with a one-nation-one-data policy so that institutions need not submit different data sets to different institutions like AICTE and NBA," he said. AICTE will think of allowing core engineering faculty members to teach in emerging areas from 2024-25.

"AICTE has already allowed core engineering faculty members to teach courses in emerging areas within the department. If these teachers certified themselves with NPTEL MOOC courses, we might think of allowing them to teach in other departments as well," he said.

AICTE has translated the textbooks for diploma courses and engineering first and second year into 13 languages including Tamil. "Professors from IITs and NITs have developed these books. So far more than one lakh students have downloaded these books from the AICTE's portal," Sitharam said. He said AICTE has removed the restriction on establishing new institutions.