In a bid to prevent students from falling prey to the pirated technical courses, the Telangana government has decided to introduce genuine technical courses through the Telangana Academy for Skill and Knowledge (TASK). 

Hyderabad, for a long time, has witnessed thriving businesses for pirated technical courses, which almost 3.5 lakh engineering aspirants take up every year. Rise in unemployment among engineering students has been a fodder for many such private institutes in Hyderabad. Students shell out anywhere between Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 to learn courses SAP Fico, Java, Ruby, Oracle among many others. But not anymore as the Telangana government’s initiative is aimed at providing genuine courses to students to help them land creamy jobs in the future. “TASK is already facilitating students with courses such as Tiezen and Bluemix. In the future, we plan to add more such genuine courses in order to make engineering aspirants more employable,” said Jayesh Ranjan, IT secretary in Telangana. 

To help students learn these technical courses, officials are now negotiating a preferential price with the developers so that they can be made available to students at a must cheaper price. 

To address this menace, even the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad (JNTU-H) recently sent a notice to all the engineering colleges to buy only original software. “Majority colleges are engaged in buying pirated software which do not provide students with the latest version. Therefore, students fail to obtain full knowledge due to which they end up spending huge sum in private institutes. We have urged colleges to purchase only genuine software so that students are equipped with the latest knowledge in their respective fields,” said B Anjaneya Prasad, professor of mechanical engineering and director of evaluation, JNTU-H.

Incidentally, in a recent analysis conducted by the JNTU-H, it was found that electronics and communication engineering graduates top the list of the unemployed in Telangana. Therefore, many end up shifting into IT/ITes sectors. While about 60,000 engineering graduates pass out every year in Telangana, 25,000 being from ECE graduates, the analysis reveals that less than 10 per cent of these graduates land up jobs in their specialised fields.