AICTE effort to make students more industry-ready
Technical
education institutions in India will soon have internships as a mandatory
requirement for the award of degrees.
The
All-India Council for Technical Education — the regulator for maintaining norms
and standards in technical education — has set the ball rolling to make
internships a mandatory part of technical education in the country.
“For a
beginning, we are asking institutions providing technical education to arrange
for internships for 75% of their students. We will also help by trying to get
industry bodies and MSMEs on board for this. The institutions can then contact
these bodies to facilitate internships,” said a senior official of the AICTE
who did not wish to be named. “Once we get this process streamlined, we will in
about three years make internships a mandatory requirement for the award of
degrees.”
In
other words, while the onus would first be on the technical educational
institutions to put in place systemic arrangements to facilitate internships,
it would soon transform into a regime where the onus would also be on the
students to intern somewhere to become eligible for the degree. “The final
vision is to ensure that those who pass out have interned and thus have
experience of industry pace and requirements,” an official said.
Vast purview
The
purview of the AICTE is vast: it covers programmes of technical education,
including training and research, in engineering, technology, architecture, town
planning, management, pharmacy, applied arts and crafts, hotel management and
catering technology, etc.
The
Ministry of Human Resource Development – under which the AICTE is an autonomous
institution – has also been in the loop regarding this change.
Internships,
it is felt, would make the students more industry-ready, providing a set of
hands-on skills and experience of the work environment in the industry to
complement their academic and theoretical insights into their discipline.
