AICTE has given permission to Fourteen Engineering colleges to teach in regional languages.
All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) has given permission to Fourteen engineering colleges across eight states to collectively admit over 1,000 students in undergraduate programmes that will be taught in regional languages from the new academic year.
In fourteen engineering colleges four from Uttar Pradesh, two from Rajasthan and one each from Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand will teach in Hindi. The remaining colleges from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu will offer the programme in Telugu, Marathi, Bengali and Tamil, respectively.
The technical education regulator’s approval has been granted for select branches most of them are for Computer science, followed by Electrical and Electronics engineering, Civil engineering, Mechanical engineering and Information technology.
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This is the first year that AICTE in line with provisions of the new National Education Policy (NEP) that calls for education in one’s mother tongue as far as possible has permitted engineering colleges to offer B.Tech programmes in 11 regional languages (Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Malayalam and Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi and Oriya).
Last year in November, the Union Education Ministry had announced that would will push for technical education, especially engineering, in regional languages, starting from the 2021-22 academic year. The Ministry had also indicated that some of the top engineering schools such as the IITs and NITs might be among the first to implement this.
The response of the IITs to this announcement was lukewarm. Most were not in favour of the proposal, arguing that since the demography of students studying in IITs is diverse, offering B.Tech programmes in several regional languages would not be feasible.
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