Over one lakh engineering seats are vacant in the state, and many engineering colleges face closure.
As parents scramble all over the country, paying a king's ransom to get their child an engineering seat, Andhra Pradesh has a problem of plenty.
There are few takers for engineering seats in the state. After the first phase of admissions this year, over one lakh seats are vacant and nearly 50 engineering colleges face closure. Of these, 13 had no students seek admission and 34 colleges got less than 10 applications each.
The dwindling interest in engineering courses is because a shocking 75 per cent of engineering graduates from colleges in Andhra Pradesh report that they have not found jobs after they finished their courses.
The state has 609 private and 34 government colleges in the country that offer nearly 2,35,000 engineering seats. But many of them don't have the requisite infrastructure, facilities or human resources to be able to produce quality engineers.
Srinivasulu, who graduated two years ago and couldn't get a suitable job, decided he would sit for the civil services exam instead. "In many colleges, the faculty and infrastructure is not good or it is simply not there at all. Out of 700 colleges, hardly 200-300 have the basic facilities and students from there do fine. For the rest, even getting a job that will earn them 10,000 rupees is very difficult," he says.
Experts say technical jobs are not shrinking. There is still a growing demand but engineers here are unable to get those jobs because they lack both subject and technical knowledge as well as analytical ability, communication and social skills.
Professor Jayaprakash Rao, chairperson of Andhra Pradesh Council for Higher Education, admits quality is a big issue and an even bigger concern is the availability of qualified teachers. "In our anxiety to expand technical education in the country, we have started a large number of institutes, but unfortunately, we don't have technically qualified people to teach our engineering students. What people are saying is that there is a requirement, a demand, but your students coming out of engineering colleges are not employable.''
The state now needs to prioritise quality and not quantity.