The churning process in the over-crowded engineering education market in Tamil Nadu has begun. With admissions due to be over on August 23, over 75 self-financing engineering colleges here are facing a survival crisis.At least 28 of these institutions, most of them hardly a year old, have managed to attract students in just single digits under the recently concluded centralised admissions conducted by Anna University. The number of students admitted to these colleges under the management quota could not be obtained.As per statistics provided by Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions Secretary P. Narayanasamy, not even one candidate has joined Maduramangalam-based S.M. Kader Engineering College, which offered 120 seats under the Single Window Scheme (SWS). Twenty-seven colleges drew less than nine aspirants and in nearly 65 other engineering colleges, over two-thirds of the seats under the SWS are vacant.Former Anna University vice-chancellor M. Anandhakrishnan attributes the poor intake to the turnaround in the education market. ‘‘Earlier anybody would blindly rush to an engineering college, no matter if it was in a cowshed. Now people have become choosy,’’ he says.Anandhakrishnan suggests a ‘‘coalition mode’’, under which colleges located in each locality could share ‘‘academic and infrastructural facilities’’. All India Council for Technical Education Regional Officer M. Ravichandran said he has called for official statistics and will then decide on measures to be taken.
