Calcutta University has decided to reserve all 300 BTech seats for the four-year programme, changing its earlier plan of allotting a percentage of seats to the older three-year programme that only science graduates can pursue.
Eight four-year courses were started last year with half the BTech seats reserved for them. This year, 55 per cent of the seats were reserved for the courses and the plan, said CU dean of engineering Nikhil Ranjan Das, is to increase the percentage to 65 next year.
The university has not yet decided how many years of gradual increase would lead to all the BTech seats being eventually allotted to the four-year courses, said a senior official.
The original plan was to cap the percentage of seats allotted to the four-year courses at 80.
The decision to scrap the three-year course has been prompted by job market reality and "encouraging response" to the four-year programme by students.
The senior CU official said over the past two years, the university had been second only to Jadavpur University in attracting bright students through the state JEE. "The JEE rankers who would narrowly miss a seat at JU and opt for the erstwhile Bengal Engineering and Science University (now the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, a central government institution that selects undergraduate students through JEE-Main) are now coming to CU. The average lowest state JEE rank across the eight engineering disciplines we offer is about 1,600. This has encouraged us to convert all the seats to the four-year programme," said the official.
The need for four-year courses was felt because the job market had shrunk drastically for three-year BTech graduates.
The three-year courses used to fetch lucrative jobs when it was launched several decades ago. "Over the years, the courses lost their lustre with the brighter students opting for a four-year engineering programmes because of better job prospects," said a professor of computer science and engineering at CU.
In September 2013, the then CU vice-chancellor, Suranjan Das, was gheraoed on the Rajabazar science college campus for 14 hours by engineering students protesting poor placements. The incident had prompted the then governor and chancellor, M.K. Narayanan, to summon Das to Raj Bhavan in September 2013 to find out the reason behind the siege.
The following May, Das announced the authorities' intention of introducing four-year BTech courses at CU. But even after the four-year courses were started in 2015, a percentage of BTech seats were kept reserved for the three-year courses. "This meant that the students studying the three-year BTech would continue to suffer the old placement problems," said a CU professor.
In July, the new CU interim vice-chancellor Asutosh Ghosh first hinted that the three-year BTech courses might be scrapped, a possibility that is likely to be realised over the next few years.
A CU official said the decision was made after the authorities assessed that the infrastructure was adequate for the switch. Nearly Rs 12 crore has been spent on restructuring laboratories and setting up workshops and workstations in preparation for the change.
The university offers four-year courses in electrical engineering, electronic and computer engineering, computer science and engineering, information technology, optics and optoelectronics, chemical engineering, chemical technology, and polymer science and technology.
It has been offering a four-year programme in jute technology, for which students are admitted through the state JEE, since the late 1980s.
