| NAGPUR: Maharashtra will have a separate technical sciences university that will start functioning from academic session 2014-15. The new university will be headquartered at Lonare in Raigad district and will be named as Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Technical Sciences University. All colleges in the state imparting graduate and postgraduate technical courses will have the option of affiliation to the new university.
The proposal was cleared by the state Cabinet at its special meeting in Mumbai on Thursday. The new technical university will be run through four divisional centres at Nagpur, Mumbai, Pune and Aurangabad. There will five sub-centres at Amravati, Nanded, Jalgaon, Kolhapur and Solapur for the unitary university that is being set up with an aim of improving standards of technical education in the state.
"The state government has been contemplating for a long time on measures to ease pressure on conventional universities that seem overburdened with a large number of affiliated colleges imparting technical courses like engineering. Now, it is proposed to put colleges that teach courses approved by All India Council of Technical Education, including engineering streams, pharmacy, architecture and hotel management under the new technical university," said higher and technical education minister Rajesh Tope.
He claimed the move would streamline technical education in the state and pave way for their improvement. Except the business management courses, all other technical colleges can be affiliated to the technical university, he said. The Maharashtra Universities Act 1994 will also be suitably amended to end monopoly of conventional universities.
For setting up divisional centres and sub-centres, each conventional university would be asked to hand over five-acre land plot under its possession to the technical university. Rs 15 crore have been sanctioned for initial process of setting up the centres during the current financial year. If needed, the facilities will be started in rented premises.
In the last one decade, Maharashtra was at the forefront in privatizing professional technical education. Hundreds of engineering colleges, most of them owned by politicians, mushroomed all over the state. But the conventional universities were finding it tough to manage them, leading to fall in standards. In current academic year, around 50,000 engineering seats remained vacant in the state. |