Engineering Education in India: Perception versus Reality

"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Scientists dream about doing great things, Engineers do them"

- Albert Einstein

According to a recent survey by McKinsey & Co., a global consulting firm, only 20% of Indian engineers are employable with regard to their technical, communication and leadership skills. This study highlights an unsavoury aspect of Indian education system, which lies contrary to the popular belief that India is a global factory of engineers and other knowledge workers.

This event is fallout of the historic human tendency of being concerned more with quantity at the cost of quality. Moreover, we are more concerned with employment statistics rather than individual employability. In this modern Information Communication Era (I.C.E.) comprising of a whole gamut of knowledge-based industries, the country, the company or the individual who leads the pack is the one possessing a plethora of skills and offering maximum value addition to a product or a service at the lowest possible price. This offers value for money to customers from Shanghai to San Francisco, New York to New Delhi, thus achieving excellence in this no-borders world. In such a dog-eat-dog environment, the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest applies. In this fiercely competitive market scenario, possession of skilled human resources is a potent force multiplier for any organisation. This leads to organisations scouting for potential recruits with multiple skills. Thus, it is an imperative for the individual to keep on adding to his skill-set by constantly learning, de-learning and re-learning the nuances of his particular profession and keeping a tab on latest advancements in order to enhance his competitiveness leading to an overall increase in his employability.  Employment is a very archaic concept, rendered obsolescent by rapid changes in the global economy, wrought out due to raising of the iron curtain and return of many emerging economies like India from autarky, back into the mainstream global economy. During the pre-globalisation era, one of the primary responsibilities of a welfare state was to provide employment to its denizens, resulting in loss-making public sector enterprises akin to our recently turned around Indian Railways. In this globalised world, the emphasis lies on the value-addition done by a company or its human resources to a product cycle, leading to enhanced quality or reduced production costs resulting in favourable bottom lines.                                                                                                               For this skill-set addition and for acquiring the ability of thinking out-of-box, engineering education has to be re-booted with a holistic approach. At present, engineering education in India under the auspices of AICTE (barring a few islands of excellence) has been turned into a no-holds-barred money-making racket by some unscrupulous elements. This springing up of clusters of so-called engineering colleges across the country, has turned India into an assembly line of products (i.e. engineering graduates) with shoddy quality control, which if unchecked will lead to an absence of any takers for this product.                                                                                                                                     However, the buck does not stop with the institutions; it stops with us, the students. We must be the drivers of change which we want to see in the world around us. Never before in the history of mankind has there been an opportunity as such, for the citizens of any civilisation to uplift their nation solely through their brain-power. Such an opportunity lies before us Indians. If we fritter away such a golden opportunity due to our sense of complacency and lethargy, we will have done a sin unpardonable by the God, the country and the generations to come.                                                                                                     

In 1960s, Americans rallied behind J.F. Kennedy’s call to study engineering and science in order to power America’s moon-shot. Making India a developed nation, a superpower by 2020 is our moon-shot. For this we need world-class engineers and scientists. Hence, my fellow compatriots, in order to make our moon-shot a reality, let us rally around the clarion call given by our former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and work harder and smarter, for becoming not only engineers but also imagineers, so as to make our great nation achieve its truest potential and to create an El Dorado on this Terra Firma.