Hyderabad: Contradicting its own stance on private engineering colleges the Telangana government has denied permission to colleges to cut down course intakes and to scrap certain streams from this academic year.

Nearly 200 private engineering colleges in Telangana had sought permission from the All India Council of Technical Education, JNTU Hyderabad and the state government to cut down admissions which would have helped restore adequacy of infrastructure to some extent. But, astonishingly, while JNTU Hyderabad agreed to this, the government didn’t give its nod to even a single college.

AICTE allows engineering colleges to cut down intakes or scrap certain disciplines under Chapter 2 of AICTE rules, if they think they are redundant. For instance, a college can be allowed to cut its intake in Computer Science Engineering from 120 to 60 or so. As reported earlier, nearly 200 private engineering colleges had applied for permission to cut their intake which would have resulted in an estimated reduction of 35,000 engineering seats in Telangana.

For this, the AICTE requires colleges to individually obtain permission from the affiliating university and the government. “About 180 engineering colleges affiliated to JNTU Hyderabad and some more affiliated to Osmania University had applied for course intake reduction under Chapter 2. The universities gave No Objection Certificates to all colleges but we didn’t receive even a single NOC from the government,” an AICTE official said.

While on the one hand, the TRS government has continuously talked about restoring quality in engineering education and even helping colleges restore quality, on the other hand, it has been extremely callous towards practical implementation. “The government is saying colleges have no quality. We want to cut down admissions so that our existing infrastructure matches the students' intake. But these people want to selectively close down colleges,” an engineering college owner said.