Years ago, parents use to say that their kids would be either doctors or engineers but it looks that they would have to change their opinions now. Recently, 368 posts for peons were announced in UP with 23 lakh candidates applying for it, out of which 2.2 lakh were engineers. This shows the future of engineering with the decrease in student's intake and courses offered by engineering colleges.
The data says that engineering colleges have reduced the number of seats by 1.3 lakh in the last three years between 2013-14 and 2015-16. Thus, same proportion of students has also decreased.
Due to shutting down of approx 71 engineering colleges, more than 23000 seats were reduced, while some (1279) colleges preferred decreasing the courses offered for engineering including diploma/UG/PG. while analyzing state wise, what was shocking was the fact that Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra who have highest number of engineering colleges reduced over 80000 seats.
There is a trend of decline in number of students joining engineering courses as from 10.1 lakh in 2012-13, students dropped to 9.9 lakh in 2013-14 with 9.1 in 2014-15. Despite these, number of approved seats has increased from 16.5 to 18 lakhs between 2012-13 and 2014-15. Over the three years, student intake has decreased from 61% to 51% approved seats.
There has been a slowdown in engineering jobs, thus students intake has decreased. This can be proved from the fact that in 2011, out of 121 lakh people holding technical degrees or diploma, 16 lakh were unemployed with 3.1 lakh working as marginal workers. Overall, people with technical degrees working as marginal workers were 5.7 lakh.