India’s technical education regulator will not grant permission to start engineering colleges for at least two years from 2020 as there are not enough takers for seats in the existing colleges.

The All India Council for Technical Education wants the colleges to improve their standard so that they are not left with vacant seats, council chairman Anil Sahasrabudhe said at a programme in the city on Friday.

“We had formed a committee last year involving experts from different domains for creating a perspective plan as far engineering education is concerned. The committee said that today the number of colleges and the number of seats that are available are far more than what is required for our country…. What’s the point in opening new colleges? Try to improve the standard of the new colleges and create the possibility of attracting more students to the colleges,” Sahasrabudhe said at the programme, organised by the Indian Chambers of Commerce.

“We will not take applications for new colleges. We have banned it for two years both for engineering and pharmacy colleges from next year.”

Referring to the committee’s report, he said India had 14 lakh engineering seats and 10 lakh engineering students.

If the colleges fail to improve their standards, Sahasrabudhe warned, there would be more and more unemployed engineers.

R. Chidambaram, the principal scientific advisor to the Centre, had last year flagged the mismatch between the demand for and the number of engineering seats. At the NIT Durgapur convocation in April 2018, he had expressed concerns over private engineering colleges with “indifferent quality creating a situation of job-less growth”.

According to teachers at engineering institutes, Bengal, too, has witnessed mushrooming of private engineering colleges with indifferent quality.

That and lack of internships and soft skills have created a situation where graduates are landing jobs with such poor pay that they are effectively jobless, said an official at Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology, to which all private engineering colleges are affiliated to.

“The colleges are not up to the mark because they hesitate to introduce new-age courses like machine learning and artificial intelligence,” he said.

Sahasrabudhe said the teachers would have to train themselves in AI and machine learning so that students got attracted to their lectures.

“You have set 75 per cent attendance for the students.... But if the teachers remain rooted to what they had learnt 25 years ago when they got the job, they will lose attention of the students. To address this,we have developed training modules where teachers will be empowered in understanding the new developments in technology.”