Bhubaneswar, Oct. 26: Private engineering colleges, battling vacant seats for a few years, want to run other courses to stay in the business.

The colleges, in a letter to All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the state government and the Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT), last week sought their permission to open general and other technical courses.

They want to run courses that include Plus Two science to arts, science and commerce subjects in the undergraduate and postgraduate level. They also want to start courses in industrial training, engineering diploma and skill development.

Running an institute and managing the infrastructure without students has become very difficult for most private engineering colleges in the state.

Besides huge electricity bills and faculty charges, a large amount is spent on the upkeep and maintenance of the campus.

"What is the problem if the colleges can utilise the infrastructure in a better way?" said Odisha Private Engineering College Association secretary Binod Dash.

He said that the decision to open such courses should not be a problem as many state-run technical universities and colleges had already been running basic science, humanities and technical education courses under one roof. Citing the examples of Veer Surendra Sai University of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Dash said there shouldn't be a problem if BPUT offered similar courses in its affiliated colleges.

Many engineering colleges have downed shutters in the past three years because of the shortage of students.

The recent one in the list was the Gandhi Institute of Industrial Technology (GIIT), Berhampur, which applied for closure in May.

Founded in 2008, the institute, affiliated to the BPUT, used to offer 420 BTech seats in five streams.

The International School of Business Management, an autonomous institution at Gangapada on the city outskirts, had also applied for closure in the same month as the GIIT.

It had attracted eight students, against a capacity of 50, in 2013-14 and two in 2014-15.

At least another 21 institutions have decided to downsize operations from the coming academic session. These institutions had sought the scrapping of certain streams or decreasing their intake capacity in the branches that were losing popularity.

There are a total of 101 engineering colleges in the state with around 45,000 seats. Last year, only 18,000 of these seats were filled up after the first round of counselling.