Engg colleges in Kerala face idle capacity despite 100% job absorption

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Thiruvananthapuram, Apr 17 : Demographic contraction, through fall in birth rates, seems to have left a challenging footprint on Kerala’s technical education infrastructure. Despite 100% absorption to job market, as many as 1,670 seats are lying vacant in 87 engineering colleges in the State.

Nearly all engineering college students in Kerala, who passed out in the 2006-2007 batch, got lapped up by the labour market. It’s the fresh enrollment to these colleges that falls short of capacity, says a study by National Technical Manpower Nodal Centre (NTMNC).

The State has 26,430 engineering seats. Only 24,760 of these had qualified takers in the last academic year, according to the report of NTMNC unit in Kochi.

Although the job prospects of all disciplines are fairly sound, the annual report of NTMNC unit, functioning in CUSAT, has recommended the upgradation of soft skills in the engineering students so that their employability is enhanced effectively. Kerala Government has embarked on a Rs 13-crore finishing school programme in the current year for engineering graduates.The State IT Mission is offering employability training to 1500 students (of rural background) per year.

At the same time, the availability of qualified students for engineering seats is also hampered by Kerala’s demographic feat of falling birth rates. Crude birth rate fell from 40 in early 20th century to 16 and is more or less stable. This was the result of a combination of factors like rise in marriage age of girls, high unemployment rate that affects desired family size and also reasonable prosperity through Gulf migration. One of the main long-term implication of falling fertility rates, according to researchers S Irudaya Rajan and KC Zachariah (Centre for Development Studies), are that the pressure on colleges will be a thing of the past.