Engineering teachers in Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Chhattisgarh will now be trained by the faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.

The Board of Governors of IIT Kharagpur has approved the creation of an Extension Centre at Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Raipur in Chhattisgarh, Damodar Acharya, IIT (K) Director told The Hindu on Thursday. Finer details are being worked out, he said.

There are concerns over the quality of teaching in engineering and technical institutions in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Chhattisgarh because of lack of facilities for training of teachers.

In Chhattisgarh, the admissions to undergraduate engineering programmes in the various colleges show that in as many as 17 engineering colleges (all of them in the non-government sector), 60 per cent or more seats remained vacant. Even though many of these institutions may satisfying the minimum requirements in terms of number of faculty as laid down by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the quality of instructions is always questionable.

Prof Acharya explained that teachers and engineers from these two places would be trained through video-conferencing and contact mode and granted an M.Tech Degree but this course would be extended to three years instead of two which is the regular course duration. The faculty would have to attend classes on week-ends at an identified centre – possibly at Kolkata or Bhubaneshwar – and once a month visit Kharagpur for laboratory classes. “If this does not work out, we can have the students (faculty) visiting Kharagpur once in a semester for longer duration,” Prof Acharya said.

Neither Madhya Pradesh nor Chhattisgarh has an IIT. The nearest IITs are all in the surrounding States of Rajasthan (Kota), UP (Kanpur), Orissa (Bhubaneswar) and Andhra Pradesh (Hyderabad).