Revamp of IT, engineering courses

The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to revamp technical-education courses in 10 different streams to make them more industry friendly. R.A. Yadav, vice-chairman, AICTE, told the Hindustan Times: ?Earlier this month, we constituted 10 boards to come up with new syllabi for information technology (IT) and engineering courses, keeping in mind job prospects in the near future."

Published on: Nov 20, 2006, 01:13:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to revamp technical-education courses in 10 different streams to make them more industry friendly.

R.A. Yadav, vice-chairman, AICTE, told the Hindustan Times: “Earlier this month, we constituted 10 boards to come up with new syllabi for information technology (IT) and engineering courses, keeping in mind job prospects in the near future."
The revamp is also aimed at attracting more students to new streams in IT education. There will be greater collaboration with industry, and more stress on practical job training.

Headed by senior academicians like Dr M.M. Faroqui, former vice-chancellor, Aligarh Muslim University, the boards preparing the new syllabi also have representatives from IT and related industries. NASSCOM is expected to work on the basic drafts for the All India Board of IT Education.

The new syllabi are likely to be introduced from the next academic year in all technical-education institutes directly under the AICTE’s control. They can act as ‘model’ syllabi, which can then be adopted by the technical institutes under the control of state governments.

“Since technical education is a state subject, we cannot enforce the syllabus all over the country,” said an HRD Ministry official. The move to evolve new syllabi comes in the wake of severe criticism of technical-education standards in the country by the industry.

Recently, NASSCOM, which represents the IT industry, said most IT professionals from Indian institutes needed re-training after employment before they could be assigned tasks. Sam Pitroda, chairman, National Knowledge Commission, has also stressed on the need to improve technical-education syllabi.

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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