MUMBAI: The All India Council for Technical Education has put the brakes on engineering education. With a glut in BTech institutes across India, no fresh applications for setting up new institutes will be accepted till 2022. The decision draws upon the experience of the admission season of 2019-20 which saw every other seat in this technical stream remain vacant.India has 27 lakh seats in the undergraduate (14 lakh), diploma (11 lakh) and postgraduate (1.8 lakh) space, but only 13 lakh students took admissions in 2019-20, with seven lakh of them joining undergraduate programmes. "In view of the large number of vacant seats in various programmes during the last few years and the likely future demand, the council shall not grant approval to new technical institutions at the diploma/ undergraduate/postgraduate level in engineering and technology," stated the new AICTE handbook that defines the guidelines for the coming academic year.The council's committee headed by IIT-Hyderabad chairman BVR Mohan Reddy suggested that the ban be reviewed after two years.In 2019, merely six lakh graduates found jobs during campus placements, according to AICTE data. Between 2015 and 2019, a total of 518 engineering colleges shut down.Experts say the technical education sector needed a massive revamp. "The hopeless engineers and sluggishness in the industry are leading to a massive breakdown of technical education in India," said G D Yadav, former vice-chancellor, Institute of Chemical Technology.The National Perspective Plan also states that existing colleges asking for new programmes or for increase in student intake in engineering and technology will be turned down, barring those that are starting courses in emerging areas.The Reddy report stated if one looked at seats available versus students admitted, the number stood as low as 49.8%. "Creating any further capacity is a big drain on investments since, at the very basic level, it involves the creation of physical infrastructure like buildings and laboratory infrastructure. We recommend that we do not create any new capacity starting from the academic year 2020. The creation of new capacity can be reviewed every two years after that."When the sun of the new millennium rose, shining on the aspirations of a young India, it marked the golden age for professional education. In the early part of the previous decade, hundreds of new institutes came up and thousands of aspirants queued up to join them. That was a time when the country was bullish on education and India added tens of thousands of seats to its professional colleges every year. Two decades hence, the picture is one of stark contrast in technical professional colleges.Joining a professional college was once the pinnacle of an Indian student's career. So students, left with little choice, often joined anonymous colleges. But now, they are put off by one or more of these three reasons: Poor quality of teaching, lack of adequate faculty or no job offer at the end. The tables have turned and candidates scoring even a zero in entrance exams are invited to sign up at engineering institutes. Yet, colleges are running half-empty. The engineering space indeed needs re-engineering.