Ranchi, Feb. 5: Substandard engineering colleges “cheating” students with poor infrastructure will be closed down soon, the head of technical education in India said today.

“Quality, not quantity, is the need?. We, at the All India Council of Technical Education, will replace regular (routine) inspection of institutes with surprise ones, so that colleges sleeping over students’ careers and cheating them are shut down,” council chief Damodar Acharya said, earning a long spell of applause from his audience of over 2,000 graduates at the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, in Ranchi.

Acharya cited an example to buttress his point about lack of quality.

“A leading software company in the country was training 100 Chinese and 100 Indian personnel, offering each group the same training module and similar facilities,” he said. “It found 85 of the Chinese securing A-plus grade while only 15 of the Indians managed the same grade.”

He made another stunning claim ? that of the country’s 3 lakh technical degree holders, only 30 per cent were good enough to be given jobs.

Acharya’s comments were in keeping with a drive by the council ? the apex body supervising the more than 6,000 technical institutes spread across the country ? to get these colleges to clean up their act.

A “code of conduct” the council laid down in November says: “There will be surprise visits to ensure the maintenance of norms and standards. Violation of these would lead to punitive and legal action.”

The institutes must, from now on, disclose their infrastructure, faculty composition and laboratory facilities so that students can make an “informed” choice.

Till now, it was left to inspection teams to discover the flaws; but the inspections being known beforehand, the institutes did their best to cover them up.

Acharya rued the falling number of good students who take up science, and said this led to the poor quality of science graduates and, therefore, science teachers.

“The decrease in quality of intake at BSc, MSc and PhD levels is responsible for poor output of science and mathematics teachers. This explains the decrease in quality of plus-two education.”

He added that technical education, too, faced an acute shortage of qualified faculty.

“In engineering alone, the demand is for 1.2 lakh teachers, but the system today has hardly 7,000 PhDs and 20,000 MTechs. The rest are fresh BTech degree holders. This is mainly because graduates consider teaching the last career option.”