It seems that the students are not showing much interest to join Tamil medium engineering courses now in Tami Nadu. It is true that in the 4 rounds of engineering counselling there were fewer takers for Tamil medium based engineering courses .
Just 88 seats have been filled out of a total of 360 seats that are available for Tamil medium based civil engineering course at College of Engineering or CEG, Guindy in AU or Anna university and in other engineering colleges. In the same way, just 84 seats out of a total of 429 seats have been filled up in Tamil based mechanical engineering courses. The reasons for just fewer students showing interest now is due to the lack of job opportunities for the Tamil medium students coupled with declining interest in studying core engineering subjects.
It must be taken into note that the engineering students prefer attending classes in bilingual and writing exams in English. Translation of engineering textbooks from English to Tamil has been done by TN Textbook and Educational Services Corporation. In addition, AICTE has also been translating engineering textbooks from English to regional languages.
According to the vice-chancellor of AU Mr. Velraj it was clear that to attract more students into Tamil medium engineering courses job opportunities must be increased. He hinted that in CEG most of the seats in the Tamil B.E course have been filled. Dean of CEG, Suganthi spoke about how 24 students have joined Tamil medium civil engineering and 26 students have joined Tamil medium mechanical engineering.
Information is that there are a total of 30 seats each in both civil and mechanical engineering in CEG. At CEG, the Tamil medium based engineering students could choose to write their exams in either English or in Tamil language but the faculty would teach the subjects only in Tamil.