As per the status report prepared by the state Higher Education Department, all the 14 government-engineering colleges in the state are short of teaching staff. These colleges require 241additional teaching staff including professors, assistant professors and lecturers.

This apart, a large chunk of World Bank fund granted to four engineering colleges including the state’s best, LD College of Engineering, under the Central Government’s National Projects Implementation Unit (NPIU) to spend on infrastructure and equipment purchase remained unutilised till the deadline of June 2007. “The government woke up at the last moment to spend the sum of Rs 80-crore granted under the scheme, but could spend only Rs 20-crore, while the remaining Rs 60-crore had to be returned,” said a source.

The status report shows that the Government Engineering Colleges at Gandhinagar, Patan, Bhavnagar, Rajkot, Valsad, Bharuch, Dahod and Surat are yet to have their own independent building, let alone sufficient faculty. They are running under the existing polytechnic colleges. Colleges at Dahod, Patan, Surat, Bhavanagar, Valsad and Bharuch do not even have a single professor or assistant professor to teach students. State’s top-ranked LD College of Engineering is short of 49 faculty staff, shows the report.

LDCE Principal MN Patel agreed the college was short-staffed, but accepted the government was working towards plugging in the gap: “Recruitment of a large number of faulty members is in the pipeline. We will soon plug in the gap in the existing requirement,” he said.

Principal Secretary, Higher and Technical Education, P Panneervel could not be reached for his comments on the situation of engineering colleges in the state despite repeated attempts.

The deteriorating quality of technical education coupled with a large number of poorly-equipped Self Financed Institutes (SFIs) getting affiliated to the Gujarat University last year led to a slump in results, so much so that the university had to intervene to grant upto 18 grace marks to first-year students to promote them to the next class. Despite this, 56 per cent of a total 5,483 students appearing in the exam flunked.

“Five new SFIs were granted affiliation to the university as late as November, which delayed the academic year for first-year engineering. Students could not perform in their first annual exam after which the University had to intervene to bail them out with grace marks,” said GU Vice Chancellor, Parimal Trivedi.

“Both the university and the government are to blame for the poor results. It is the responsibility of the university to maintain a proper academic calendar and the government to maintain proper infrastructure and faculty requirements so students can get quality education,” said Manish Doshi, President, Youth Congress who used RTI for status report on faculty and infrastructure in government-run engineering colleges in the state.