Thiruvananthapuram: The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to introduce new rules of internship of engineering students.
The students will be allowed to do full-time internship during the summer vacation and part-time during the academic session. The AICTE curriculum will be made flexible to adjust internship duration. Opportunities will be provided for experiences that cannot be anticipated when planning the course. The institutions will be allowed flexible schedules to enable internship, project work and seminar according to the availability of the opportunities.
The AICTE said the students should complete 600 to 700 hours of internship, entrepreneurial activities, project work and seminar and inter or intra-institutional training.
Engineering degree and diploma students should complete an internship of 450 to 500 hours to get 10 to 14 credits. Sources said that each credit will have 40 to 45 hours of work. Till now, there were no specific rules governing internship for engineering students. “The AICTE has taken various initiatives to connect AICTE- appr-oved institutions located in a particular district with nearby villages for technological intervention and networking for holistic transformation of the rural population by identifying the possibilities of localised employment, convergence, cost reduction, youth and women empowerment etc,”it said.
It also proposed rural and social internship programme. A student can choose any of the suggestive activity under AICTE activity programme. They can devote six months for internship to achieve significant goals during degree programme so that their credit requirement for the internship will be considered fulfilled, it said.
