Hyderabad: The placement season for engineering students has reached its fag end but watchdog All India Council for Technical Education has left a lot of students disappointed.

Last year, the regulatory body had launched its own placement portal where companies could directly recruit students, akin to most job portals, but it remains dysfunctional.

Hardly any companies showed interest in the endeavour and it now seems that the servers have also been temporarily abandoned by the AICTE.

The Council had launched the placement portal for engineering students stating that it would help a lot of Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges which didn’t have mega campus placement drives like the bigger colleges. However, it hasn’t played a substantial role in getting students their dream jobs.

Senior AICTE officials say that technology and lack of monitoring was one of the reasons for its failure. Job portals need large servers and high-end tech to keep them running.

“Some companies did show interest because there is no harm in getting enrolled. But managing a job portal for the whole country is a humongous task. The technology itself would have to be very advanced,” a senior official said.

A former AICTE South Central regional official denied any knowledge about the functioning of the job portal and said that the concept was disliked by colleges because they needed to take credit of student placements themselves.

Former AICTE chairman Dr S.S. Mantha said the service needed continuous monitoring. “I can’t speak for the AICTE now but companies did show interest. But such a thing needs continuous monitoring,” he said.

Interestingly, nearly a year after the launch, the portal itself is dysfunctional with registrations of students and companies completely halted. The job search option has also become defunct. In fact, most students and college are even unaware of the job portal launched by AICTE.

A placement officer with a top engineering college in Hyderabad said, “They had launched it but it has not been functional since many days. Our placements are all through our campus.”