No New Pharmacy Colleges Till 2022 To Avoid Fate Similar To Engineering
New Delhi, 2 Sept 2019:
The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) have unanimously agreed to ban setting up of new pharmacy institutes till 2022. The decision to impose a moratorium was triggered primarily due to the unprecedented number of applications received by the councils for starting new pharmacy programmes during the academic session 2019-20. The ban, however, will not be applicable to North East and states where the number of pharmacy institutions is less than 50.
"Several technical institutes and nursing colleges saw a dip in the admissions. The buildings of these institutes were used to start pharmacy colleges. Presently, more than 3000 pharmacy colleges have enrolled more than 1 lakh students in undergraduate courses, which is adequate to meet the country's need and to cater to the global health workforce," says Dr Suresh Bhojraj, president, PCI.
As many as 1400 applications were received in 2019-20 to start new pharma colleges, of which 842 were granted approvals, with a maximum of 541 institutions in Uttar Pradesh. "The requests to start new colleges in 2019-20 where not geographically distributed and were originating only from a few states. The conditional ban would avoid the lopsided growth of the institutions and the manpower availability vis-à-vis job opportunities, leading to planned growth in the states where such education and opportunities are required," added Bhojraj. "In the past few years, regulators had approved a huge number of engineering colleges, which resulted in surplus seats and eventually, the colleges had to be shut down because there were no takers. The motive behind the decision is to avoid a similar stagnation in the field of pharmacy," says Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman, AICTE. The major challenge, says Bhojraj, is to keep pace with the advances in pharmaceutical sciences and changes in the industry demands.
"To be relevant in the dynamic academic and industry scenario, the PCI will soon integrate skill development programmes into the curriculum to increase the employability of the graduates. The master's programmes in pharmacy are also being reviewed to facilitate employment-embedded education," he added. ET Healthworld