The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has granted permission to set up 46 new technical colleges in Maharashtra in academic year 2018-19, 42 of which would be pharmacy colleges. The list also includes two architecture institutes.
The state currently has 438 pharmacy institutes, offering diploma, graduation and masters courses to aspirants. The new institutes will add around 3,700 seats in the current pool of 36,133 seats, available across the existing programmes.
On the other hand, the AICTE has also approved the closure of 40 technical institutes - most of them being engineering colleges and polytechnic institutes.
Experts said that the addition of new institutes and closure of existing ones is in accordance with the recent trends in professional education. At a time when technical courses such as engineering, management and computer application are witnessing a dip in enrolment, the demand for pharmacy courses is on the rise.
Data from the state’s Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) also shows that 56,490 out of 1.38 lakh seats for the bachelor of engineering (BE) course, and 4,842 out of 34,863 seats for Master of Business Administration (MBA) and Master in Management Studies (MMS) programmes are lying vacant. On the other hand, merely 299 out of 13,353 seats for the BPharm course have no takers.
“Even when we went through recession, the healthcare sector didn’t suffer any loss. The pharma sector is thriving because there is a rise in lifestyle diseases,” said Krishna Iyer, a professor at Bombay College of Pharmacy and chairman, board of studies for pharmacy at the University of Mumbai.
Iyer said that the pharmacy graduates have many employment and higher education opportunities available to them.
“Many graduates find employment in allied industries such as insurance companies, medical transcription and clinical data entry and processing. Marketing of medicines has become more cut-throat, thereby generating more jobs,” he said.
The experts also said that pharmacy has emerged as an alternative to medicine, as the latter has a limited intake and is increasingly becoming unaffordable to a large section of the population.
“Students who cannot get admission in medical courses opt for pharmacy,” said GD Yadav, vice chancellor, Institute of Chemical technology, Matunga.
Iyer said that adding new pharmacy institutes will expand availability of medicines in mofussil areas of the state.
“If the colleges are spread out across the state, people have better access to medicines,” he said.
The experts said that the technical education body needs be cautious while increasing the intake of pharmacy courses.
“I am not worried that pharmacy colleges will face the same situation as the engineering colleges. This is because, besides AICTE, the Pharmacy Council of India also keeps a check on these institutes,” said Yadav.
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