Coimbatore: The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has been focusing on making students set up their own businesses, rather than leaving them as job seekers , said AICTE adviser Dileep Malkhede here on Saturday.“We have been promoting activities such as incubation centre and we have several initiatives to promote entrepreneurship. For instance, we offer funds to SC/ST students to start their own businesses. AICTE has also started courses on entrepreneurship, which has been adopted by universities.”He said this in reply to a question on the nature of current job market, where graduates find it difficult to get jobs, while speaking on the sidelines of convocation of Kumaraguru College of Technology in the city.Malkhede said AICTE’s decision to change the teacher student ratio in technical institutions to 1:20 from 1:15 was part of its move to reduce the number of credits to 160 from 190. “The load of credits is substantially reduced. And now only a lesser number of teachers are required.”He, however, said the ratio given by AICTE was the minimum and if institutions needed more teachers they were free to have them.Referring to the model curriculum introduced by AICTE this year, Malkhede said students would no longer be expected to do rote learning, but they would be expected to have practical knowledge and master the skills to implement the concepts they learn. “AICTE is also planning to introduce a scheme to send faculty members abroad to pursue their PhD so that they get more exposure and more publications,” he said.Malkhede said AICTE had earlier discussed introducing a centralised entrance examination for undergraduate engineering courses in the country. “We had put forward the idea of a common entrance exam for engineering courses as several universities are having their own entrance exams and students have to prepare for them separately.” However, there is progress in this regard so far.

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