Addressing the quality deficit in India’s technical education

Relevance: This article explains the issues surrounding Engineering education and suggestions to improve them.

Synopsis:

The problems surrounding Engineering education needs immediate attention.

Introduction:

Engineering is an applied science. But private entrepreneurs without the subject knowledge took the lead to meet the country’s growing demand for technical education in the mid-Eighties. This resulted in the following challenges.

Challenges facing Engineering colleges:

1. The engineering curriculum took a hit as the management’s agenda entered academic bodies of various universities.
2. Subjects like materials, applied physics, and thermodynamics became dispensable. Several universities merrily revised their curriculum at the expense of these courses.
3. The regulatory gaps, poor infrastructure, lack of qualified faculty, and the non-existent industry linkage contributed to the abysmal employability of graduates.
4. The private colleges also failed to make a considerable investment to adapt to the dynamic environment of the job market.

Other challenges:

• Not a single industry body, be it CII, FICCI or ASSOCHAM has managed to effectively inform the education planners on the growth in different employment sectors.
• The government also failed to take any tangible steps to set up an independent body to advise AICTE on this vital aspect.

All these resulted in real dilution of Engineering education’s overall standards in the country.

Present status of Engineering colleges:

At its peak in 2014-15, AICTE-approved institutes had almost 35 lakh seats. Since 2015-16, at least 50 colleges have closed each year, and this year, AICTE approved the closure of 63 institutes.

Suggestions:

• Rather than being reactive, institutions must proactively define the practising elements of education.
• The corrective measures for these shortfalls are technology-intensive, are experiential, and need investments in teaching.
• The need of the hour is to create a truly autonomous quality assurance body at an arms-length from the government, manned by eminent persons both from the industry and academia.

Technical education has to reach the unreached sections with assured quality. Then only India can see improvements in Technical education and Engineering.