Thiruvananthapuram: All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) which decided to close down around 800 colleges in the country for the low intake and poor infrastructure is now seeking the possibility of mergers and acquisitions. The AICTE recommendation was to shut 800 colleges which did not have a minimum of 30 percent admissions for five consecutive years and lacked proper infrastructure by 2018. By the present indication, around 36 colleges in Kerala would have to be closed down, sources say.
The technical education council would ascertain legal implication of merging two colleges in the close vicinity and also whether buyouts were possible within the present law, they said. After the third and the last round of allotments to private self-financing colleges in the state, only 32 has more than 40 percent admissions in government quota. Of them, 36 had less than 30 percent intake. Most of them had been showing less than 30 percent admissions for the past five years. There are 61 branches having not even a single applicant and 66 having only one. In 23 branches, the total number of students admitted was less than 10.
APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University has advised those with poor admission rates to transfer students to other colleges in the wake of the AICTE directive, sources said. The AICTE has also announced that they would give engineering colleges an opportunity of hearing if there is enough revenue to continue by maintaining the student-teacher ratio by paying the faculty salaries according to the norms.
