Technical myth

Technical Education in India

The mania for technical Education, mainly for IT is getting decreased year by year. The huge amount of unemployed Engineers after years of their graduation, the exorbitant rate of tuition fees and other items subscribe to the factor. In India Tamilnadu might be having more Engineering institutions than other states. Everyone knows the ruling parties in their reign granted this mush-rooming amount of permission for starting as many Engineering colleges as one wishes. And the intention behind is also well to the people concerned and unconcerned.

On the whole India produces a large number of engineering graduates every year. Engineering colleges in the country have been growing at 20 per cent a year, while business schools have grown at 60 per cent annually.

Five Indian states -- Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Kerala -- account for 69 per cent of India's engineers.

Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Orissa account for only 14 percent.

From its 113 universities and 2,088 colleges -- many of which teach various engineering disciplines -- India produces nearly 350,000 engineering graduates every year.

The whole of Europe produces 100,000 engineering graduates a year,

and the much technically advanced America produces only 70,000.

When you compare Europe India produces 350% more Engineers than Europe and 500 % more than America. Indians should be happy about the progress.

But, the quality of Indian engineers is questionable, says Madhavan, who has had a career spanning four decades and is now advisor to several engineering colleges in Karnataka and Kerala.
"That is because of the lack of trained faculty and the dismal State spending on research and development in higher education in the country," he says. But multinationals find that just 25 per cent of them are employable, says a McKinsey Global Institute study. It is said that Microsoft has a large number of Indian software engineers on its rolls, in India and abroad. Of the 2,000 people working at Microsoft's Hyderabad Development Centre, software engineers make up a sizeable chunk.
But Microsoft is not happy with the quality of software programmers it is recruiting every year from India. So, the global technology behemoth does its own quality control. According to Mundie, "The lack of trained staff is addressed by us through internal arrangements for proper training."

Every year, Infosys Technologies, which employs more than 45,000 people -- most of them software engineers -- conducts campus recruitments across various engineering colleges in the country.But, a sizeable number of engineers recruited by Infosys these days are civil, mechanical or electrical engineers.

Yes, you read that correctly. Lack of quality computer engineering graduates is forcing companies like Infosys to recruit students from varied engineering disciplines, and then train them in-house to become software engineers.

"These days, aptitude and common sense are the main yardsticks for an IT company to recruit," says S Achuthshankar Nair, former director, Centre for Development of Imaging Technology, Thiruvananthapuram. The Kerala government set up C-DIT in 1988 to be a 'service provider and product innovator in new media information technology systems.'

Even as India forges ahead as a global IT player, Nair says India's institutions of higher learning have a lot of catching up to do in redefining the ambit of computing courses and remolding their curricula to keep pace with emerging trends.

And companies recruiting freshers and training them to become good computer engineers is proof of that lacuna, experts say.

So what kind of training does a company like Infosys impart to the thousands of engineering students it recruits?

The company's training and development initiatives cover the following:

Technical Training: An entry-level, 14-week programme conducted by the company's education and research department. Educationists have certified this programme as being equivalent to a BS program in the US. The education and research department at Infosys offers a variety of training programmes on a regular basis for middle-level employees as well.

Quality Process Training: This is tailored to the role of the employee: software engineer, programmer analyst, project manager, etc.

Personal Effectiveness and Managerial Programmes: To enhance managerial and leadership abilities, to enable better customer satisfaction, achieve organisational vision and create high-performing, multicultural teams.

ILS (The Infosys Leadership System): The ILS and the Infosys Leadership Institute address the issue of sustained growth in general and create a formal and committed system for developing leadership capabilities in employees.

IT consultant Arun Swamy says all major technology companies in India spend large amounts of money on training computer engineers.

"In India, computer engineers are created not in colleges, but in the intensive training programmes that companies offer to freshers," says Swamy.

Nair says overlapping curriculum in different branches of computing, often without a clear focus, has been the bane of our IT and computing education.

"All branches focus on core traditional content plus a set of specialities without very clear vision," he points out.

So, what is the way out?

Way back in 1993, the Swaminathan Committee set up by the All India Council of Technical Education suggested that greater industry participation in the development of technical and engineering education in the country must be emphasized.

The Committee advocated imposing a levy in education on the industry, increased government commitments on funding technical education and good tax incentives for engineering education.
But the Committee's recommendations have been forgotten, and engineering institutes continue to mushroom in every nook and corner of the country without any quality control.

Not many can deny that Indian students are creative, innovative and scientifically inclined. When it comes to mathematics and the physical and biological sciences, Indian schoolchildren are ahead of their counterparts in developed countries like the United States.

Many bright Indian minds opt for computer science in college to become part of the Great Indian Tech Boom story.

But companies like Microsoft -- which has a full-fledged India Development Centre in Hyderabad -- are not happy with the computer engineers they are recruiting from college campuses.

Here is more proof, in Mundie's words:

'India produces a lot of engineers. But the production of computer science engineers is low, pro rata.' 'India did not have enough software companies nor are enough companies developing India-specific applications.' The reason, Mundie argued, was the poor quality of the country's software engineers.

'There are so few Indian software companies developing local software. That is a negative reinforcement, because there is no local software and no new applications.'

'The problem with the engineers can be attributed to policy issues… Universities in India, did not get proper funding for research and were not directed towards software development.'
'[Indian] Computer engineers are more into theory and less in managing businesses, building businesses or writing source codes, the key to software development.'

Experts agree with Mundie. India's software engineers can work cheaply and quickly, but when it comes to quality, industry experts are unanimous in their opinion: Few Indian software engineers are probing new frontiers, raising the bar or exploring new horizons.

Professor J G B Tilak, senior Fellow, National Institute of Education Planning and Administration, New Delhi, says the gradual withdrawal of government support, with increased private participation in technical education, affected quality and led to commercialisation of education. The NIPEA is the Indian government's apex organisation of education planners specialising in policy, planning and management

The main concern, Tilak argues, is the "declining share of government expenditure on technical education in the total education expenditure, which presently hovers around 4 per cent, as against over 5 per cent 12 years back."

Compare this to the 15 to 30 per cent that every major economy -- including Taiwan and Brazil -- spends on national research and development. China's research and development spending, especially in engineering fields, for example, is a good 10 per cent, says a recent Forbes study.
Retired engineering professor K S Madhavan says research and development in engineering has been in a state of decline in the last few decades because of the poor state of affairs in India's colleges.