The Telangana High Court has granted permission within an interim order for 11 private engineering colleges to start new-age tech courses.
According to the TOI reports, the Telangana HC has permitted these colleges to expand more seats in their computer science and affiliated courses. However, it is unclear whether these courses will continue or not and is subject to the final court order.
A total of 11 engineering colleges, including Keshav Memorial Institute of Technology, CMR, Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology, VNR, and Vardhaman College of Engineering challenged the JNTU Hyderabad regulations and Telangana, who made it mandatory for all the colleges to seek their permission despite getting the approval from the AICTE.
In order to start new courses in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), Data Science, Cyber Security, and Machine Learning introduced by JNTU-Hyderabad, these engineering colleges sought permission from the state. Earlier, in 2020, almost 125 colleges received the approval to begin these new courses.
As per the TOI report, Professor NV Ramana Rao, Director of National Institute of Technology, (NIT) Warangal said that these new-tech courses are essential for the holistic development of engineering students.
He said that eliminating these courses is not a good decision because the problem at present is that every course works in silos, which needs to be changed. As a result, there should be a way to integrate these courses as it's done internationally where the students are permitted to opt for a mix of traditional and other courses, the TOI report said.
Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT who doubled up as VC of JNTU for almost 2 years, said that the students from these courses have limited demand in the industry.
He stated that the computer science courses and their disciplines were introduced after much research and everyone willing to pursue this course may not be correct, the TOI report said.
Ajith Rangnekar, the director-general at the research and innovation circle of Hyderabad stated that the problem lies in quality and not in quantity.
Having said that, he further informed that if the colleges are going to use the seats to increase the computer science pool, then the colleges should ensure distinguished faculties to teach the courses.
Further, Aijith highlighted that colleges are poorly connected with the industries, which reduces the student's employability rate. Therefore, this is a primary area, where the state needs to consider before coming to a conclusion.
