Against the backdrop of Indian engineering education set to experience a revival and overdue contemporisation of curriculums, EducationWorld presents its EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings 2023-24, to enable higher secondary school-leavers to pick and choose the most aptitudinally suitable private colleges for undergrad engineering education , writes Summiya Yasmeen There’s good news for aspiring engineering students in India. The Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex regulatory organisation for all engineering and technical institutions countrywide, has lifted the moratorium on promotion of new engineering colleges following a two-year ban. In its new Approval Process Handbook 2023-24 released on March 23, the council states: “Moratorium for establishing new institution(s) in engineering and technology has been lifted from AY (academic year) 2023-24. However, for establishing a new institution in engineering and technology, preference shall be given to the applicant offering courses in multi-disciplinary area in-line with NEP (National Education Policy) 2020 in STEM.” Moreover, the council has also relaxed land eligibility norms for greenfield institutions. The backstory of the two-year moratorium is that in 2019, an expert committee had advised AICTE to impose a moratorium on promotion of greenfield engineering colleges from the academic year 2020-21 due to declining student admissions. Admission applications in the country’s 3,415 engineering colleges had declined from 2.6 million in 2012-13 to 2.3 million in 2021-22. Three years later, another expert committee headed by the director of IIT-Bhubaneswar, has advised AICTE to lift the ban citing an increase in “admission percentage in engineering courses” in 2022-23. In its new approval guidelines, the council has mandated greenfield colleges to offer at least one study programme in emerging areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning in addition to core engineering subjects. In sum, civil, mechanical and electrical programmes apart, new engineering colleges will be obliged to provide cutting edge electives to students. The recently promoted private Plaksha University (estb.2021) offers a good example of the type of inter-disciplinary electives greenfield engineering colleges will be expected to provide. It offers computer science and artificial intelligence, cyber security systems, bio-systems engineering and data sciences, economics and business. Against this backdrop of Indian engineering education set to experience a revival and overdue contemporisation of curriculums, EducationWorld presents its EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings 2023-24 to enable higher secondary school-leavers to pick and choose the most aptitudinally suitable private colleges for undergrad engineering education. It’s important to highlight that since 2016, EducationWorld has been excluding the heavily subsidised and routinely top-ranked Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), preferring to evaluate and rank the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges to enable 98 percent of students who aren’t among the 2 percent who top the IIT-JEE and make it into the country’s 23 IITs and 31 NITs. Our focus is on aiding and enabling this 98 percent to choose the most suitable among private engineering colleges, some of which are rapidly closing the IITs/NITs versus the rest gap. To compile the EW…
