Govt to mark engg colleges’ performance

DTE director S K Mahajan spoke about KPI at a workshop organised in the city on Saturday by the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) in association with Vishwakarma Institute of Technology (VIT) on “How to transform engineering institutes in Maharashtra into World class institutes.”

Principal Secretary of higher education J S Saharia,executive vice-chairman of Association of Managements of Unaided Engineering Colleges R P Joshi and director of VIT Hemant Abhyankar were also present for the function.

Mahajan said the idea behind setting up of KPI was to standardise the technical education. “Besides infrastructure,the KPI will be mainly concentrating on academic excellence. We have linked the performance of colleges to fees so that every college will take it seriously,” he said.

As per the KPI,the colleges will now have to get accreditation by National Board of Accreditation (NBA). “If they fail to get it,they will lose recognition. Presently,only 46 engineering colleges of 264 are NBA accredited,” said Mahajan. “If the colleges get accreditation for all courses,they will be able to hike the tuition fee by 5 per cent,” he said.

The criterion,which will create much debate among the education fraternity,will be linking the placements records of colleges to their performance. It has been proposed that colleges in mega/metro cities should be able to place 75 per cent of its students.

Another KPI that too will be debated is about generation of maximum 20 per cent of salary revenue by faculty members themselves through research projects or providing consultancy to industries. Joshi said the association of unaided engineering colleges has welcomed the decision to set up the KPI. He however proposed to bifurcate the DTE into two wings to have a better functioning of the directorate. “There should be academic and administrative wings of DTE and independent joint directors should head them,” he said.