Colleges stoop to conquer students

The fee- reimbursement scheme seems to have done much bad than good to the students pursuing engineering in various private colleges. However, the scheme has enabled managements of private engineering colleges to mint money for some time.

Now, a majority of them are reeling in financial crisis due to inordinate delay in release of funds for the scheme. The students have got engineering degrees but are not able to secure proper jobs due to lack of necessary skills.   

Initially, there were four engineering colleges in the Adilabad district. Now, there are only two- one at Mancherial and other in Adilabad district headquarters.

The two other colleges, one at Kagaznagar and the other at Nirmal, were closed down. The college in Nirmal was shifted to Hyderabad.  The less number of colleges in Adilabad has been promoting managements of other colleges in Warangal, Karimnagar, Nizamabad and Hyderabad to lure the students belonging to the district.

Despite lack of infrastructure and qualified faculty, these colleges even offered seats on ‘Buy one get one free’ basis to attract more students to their institute. If a student gets ready for admission in college, the managements promised to offer one other seat in same college to the kin of the candidates.             

Some managements even offered Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 as good will to the students taking admissions in their college eyeing the reimbursement scheme. The government reimburses Rs 35,000 tuition fee in addition to the hostel charges for the each student.

Just as the scheme, which was introduced by former chief minister late Chief Minister Y.S Rajasekhar Reddy promoted many to set up private engineering colleges, many students, through not having command on sciences and mathematics , got admitted to the colleges because the state was paying their fee.

Some management ran the colleges in poultry sheds too and recruited jut passed B.Tech students as faulty members.

However, in separate Telangana, the ‘FAST’(Financial Assistance to Students of Telangana) scheme proposed by the Telangana state government in place of fee reimbursement scheme which declared 1956 as the cut off date for being considered as native of the state and eligible for FAST, hit the admissions to  engineering colleges.

It was reported that nearly 80 engineering colleges in the state are on the verge of closure due to lack of infrastructure and teaching faculty after inspections conducted by the committee constituted by the state government.

Deputy Director of Social Welfare Ankam Shankar said nearly 600 students were studying in the two private engineering colleges in the district. Students belonging to previous batches have also not got their post matric scholarships (including fee reimbursement) renewed for the 2014-15 due to delay in issuing of guidelines for ‘FAST’.