The Tamil Nadu government under the leadership of Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa has launched several schemes for students and teachers with an aim to make the state numero uno. To provide an opportunity to more students to enter the portals of higher education, the state government launched 22 new university constituent colleges in places like Nemmeli, Vedaranyam, Thiru thuraipoondi, Nannilam, Srirangam and Arakkonam at a total cost of Rs27.81 crore benefiting 6,726 students.
To produce more skilled manpower for industries, the state government started new polytechnic colleges at various places, including Srirangam, Gandarvakottai, Sankara puram and Perundurai at a cost of Rs 229.27 crore to benefit 2,839 students. The Indian Institute of Information Technology started functioning from 2013-2014 at Srirangam with an investment of Rs128 crore with three postgraduate courses (computer science and engineering, software engineering and database system).
The offshoot of the efforts taken by the government resulted in the gross enrolment ratio (GER) reaching 38.2 per cent in higher education, against the national average of 20.4 per cent. Enrolment of students in higher education, which was 6.51 lakh during 2010-2011, increased to 7.31 lakh in 2013-2014. Smart classrooms, with video conferencing facilities, and skill development classrooms have been made available for students to enable them to equip themselves with skills in English, Chinese, Japanese, German and other languages.
The state higher education department has issued orders for setting up employment training centres in nine universities at a cost of Rs 90 lakh to train students of engineering, medical and science colleges to enable them land jobs in modern employment fields such as Information Technology. Keeping in mind the needs for differently-abled students, the state government had established centres in 10 universities for designing various devices and to prepare various topics in English and Tamil.
Under the free laptop scheme, 5,50,576 students from government, government-aided arts and science colleges, polytechnics and engineering colleges received the computer. Since establishment of institutions without proper and essential infrastructure facilities will not yield the desired outcome, the state government sanctioned Rs100 crore for infrastructure development in all government arts and science colleges, university constituent arts and science colleges and colleges of education.
