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Engineering students can study across streams and choose any humanities, arts or commerce subject as a minor. Institutes have started offering courses which belong to other streams as well.
Engineering colleges are stressing more on the knowledge that is just not limited and goes beyond the selected fields of a person. They are starting various humanities courses alongside the existing engineering courses of their curriculum. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has granted these institutes approval to run courses in arts, humanities and commerce along with engineering.
The chairman of AICTE, Anil Sahasrabudhe, explained that the decision was taken because, in recent years, the demand for engineering has been more or less the same but the number of engineering colleges has grown significantly. With the colleges and their infrastructural scale increasing and the demand of the course remaining constant, many private engineering colleges had to shut down. This step aims at making the unused infrastructure of these institutions economically operational.
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Several technical institutes are thinking along these lines of providing multi-faceted and interdisciplinary knowledge to their students. The Thadomal Shahani Engineering College in Mumbai and the Bannari Amman Institute of Technology in Coimbatore have courses of humanities and are now considering to start full-scale M.Sc. and M.A. programmes.
Also Read: IISER Pune to Include Humanities in Basic Science Course
This measure has already been approached by colleges like the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani and many Indian Institutes of Technology. For example, IIT Madras has MA programmes in Development Studies and English. BITS provides an integrated course in M.Sc. in Development Studies and Media and Communication. Multiple IITs also have Ph.D. courses as a part of their curriculum in subjects like philosophy, literature, psychology, economics, linguistics, sociology, policy etc. The students are also free to choose a multi-disciplinary programme and opt for courses across streams.
