AICTE reduces 2 lakh seats in engineering, management, pharmacy colleges due to low demand!

All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has reduced nearly 2 lakh seats across technical colleges, including engineering, management and pharmacy this year.

According to a media report, the regulator for technical institutions in India released its latest data on admissions for the year 2020-21 early this week which shows the reduced number of seats.

In the last year academic session, there were a total of 32,85,018 seats in the engineering, management and pharmacy colleges across the country, but this year new admission will be carried out for only 30,86,022 seats.

It has been reported that the number of seats across various technical institutions like engineering, pharmacy, management and architecture have been reduced by 1,98,996 this year due to low demand for these courses.

The report quoted a senior AICTE official as saying on condition of anonymity: “The reduction in the number of seats across colleges is mainly because of shutting down of colleges that did not have the minimum number of students to run the institution.”

“There were some colleges that did not even apply for the renewal of affiliation and hence they were shut down,” said the official added.

The intake is the lowest since 2012-13, when colleges offered nearly 34 lakh seats.

After that the number of seats was increased and the total number of seats reached 39.6 lakh in 2014-15.

But the seats gradually started to decline.

According to the data shared on the official website of AICTE, the number of seats that are occupied each year are almost half the number of seats that are available across institutions.

This is why the regulator has decided to reduce the number of seats this year.

The AICTE official said: “Intake across colleges is coming down each year because of strict AICTE regulations. It is a process to weed out colleges that were running like a fly-by-night operator.”

“The council has very strict regulations that ensure that if a college does not have a minimum required number of students, the institution will be shut down,” the official added.