ill prepared for future

ill prepared for future

Context

There is a grave lack of engineering skills. This impacts industry, affects programmes such as Make in India.

The Great Indian Engineering Paradox

India produces more engineers than China and the US combined

• Quantity over Quality

But in the past seven years, several reports have pointed out that India’s engineering institutes do not provide state-of-art skills

• Different surveys indicate same thing
  • A NASSCOM survey of 2011, for example, pointed out that only 17 per cent of the engineering graduates in the country are employable
  • This signaled a mismatch between the demands of industry and the technical education system
• Governments do nothing

The then UPA government did little to address this situation But the NDA government has done no better.

• National Employability Report

Last year, the National Employability Report revealed that more than 80 per cent of the students who passed out of engineering schools in 2015 did not have the competencies required by industry

• Deeper Problems

An investigation by this paper, this week, has highlighted another paradox and shown that the rot runs deeper

• No takers for engineering seats
  • In 2015-16, eight lakh BE/BTech engineering students graduated, a little over a quarter of those who finished the science stream that year
  • Yet, there are no takers for more than 50 per cent of seats in the country’s engineering colleges, the investigation has revealed.
• Effect on Make in India
  • The state of engineering colleges could have a bearing on the Make in India programme that aims to bolster the country’s manufacturing capacity and generate 100 million jobs by 2022
  • According the programme’s website, Make in India will “foster innovation, enhance skill-development and build best-in-class infrastructure”. 

Highly skilled engineers needed

This will require highly-skilled engineers who can design products to meet the requirements of international competition

The Problem

The poor student intake in the country’s engineering institutes presages a shortage of human capital for the project. 

Global Comparison

Globally, higher education has expanded in two contrasting ways

Strict Regulation

Through strict regulation with rigorous insistence on quality, resulting in gradual growth of high-quality institutes

Low Entry Barriers

Low entry barriers, leading to a proliferation of colleges, but of lower quality

India has taken the second path

When it comes to engineering colleges, India has taken the second path

The AICTE needs to wake up

• The All India Council of Technical Education’s (AICTE) criteria for setting up such colleges pertain to infrastructure, such as classrooms, laboratories, libraries and student-teacher ratio
• The AICTE also has a model curriculum, revised every five years, that affiliated universities use as a base to prepare their own syllabus

Reality is different

• But this newspaper’s investigation shows that most colleges follow decades-old programmes
• With the challenge of automation looming large over manufacturing, the AICTE, and its affiliated institutes, will have to pull up their socks in order to ensure the competitiveness of Indian industry.