12 states have few seats for technical education

12 states have few seats for technical education, Arjun Singh wants corrective steps, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 14, 2006, 22:18:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Alarmed at the lopsided enrolment in technical education, HRD minister Arjun Singh has urged 12 state governments to initiate “urgent” policies to improve intake for them to come at par with the national average.

In a review of availability of seats in degree and diploma level technical education courses, the HRD ministry has identified 12 states where the seats available in the two streams was less than the national average —68 for degree and 31 for diploma courses per one lakh population.

While the southern states cross the national average, the blot are mostly the northern states of Bihar, Assam, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Jammu and Kashmir, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Orissa. The lowest intake of three students for per lakh population in degree courses is in Bihar.

The low technical education seats has prompted Singh to write a letter to Chief Ministers of these states suggesting six corrective steps to improve the number of technical education seats and allow the youth to “adequately benefit” from the opportunities available due to fast-growing economy.

The HRD minister has asked the states to open new educational institutions, especially in backward districts, and to increase intake of the existing institutions. He also wanted that the states should open new branches and courses in the emerging areas.

Indicating that private parties should be encouraged to open new institutes, Singh said, the governments could think of giving them financial incentives. However, he made it clear that these institutes should be run on “non commercial lines” and should deliver good quality education. Singh also said that the states should run programmes to improve quality of technical education and expansion of secondary education.

The ministry has also asked the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) to take special steps to promote expansion of technical education and open a special cell to facilitate applications for new institutes from these 12 states.

Email chetan@hindustantimes.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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