With no takers for engineering courses, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to lose 80,000 seats

More youngsters in India seem to be shunning engineering as a career choice. All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) chairman Anil Dattatraya Sahasrabudhe, during his visit to Chennai last month, said that nearly 40% of the engineering seats were vacant in India as students seemed to prefer other courses.

According to a report in Deccan Chronicle, one of the issues faced is the shortage of faculty in government as well as private colleges, Sahasrabudhe said. The AICTE is now going to scale down the number of seats by 40% over the next few years in India. As a result, 40,000 engineering seats each in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh will be cut. The report states that as of now Telangana has 1.85 lakh seats and Andhra Pradesh 1.8 lakh seats. 

As fewer students opted for engineering, the management of colleges in Telangana cut down the number of seats to 1.5 lakh while Andhra Pradesh cut it down to 1.45 lakh respectively. Now, the number of seats in both states will be further reduced by another 30,000 next year, the report says. The total number of seats in each state will then stand at 1 lakh.