Mumbai: The ‘engineering’ dream is a long standing one having captivated Indian parents for years. The urge to make a child an engineer reigns as strong today as it was years ago.
And while this clamour to make it to a good engineering college gets louder every year, sadly the quality of education has not exactly kept pace. Little wonder that recent AICTE data reveals that more than 35% to 40% of sanctioned seats in engineering colleges across the nation go vacant each year. A significant portion of these seats are located in rural and semi-urban areas.
According to Shankar Subbanarasayya Mantha, former chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education, “Employment nowadays requires core business and data skills that are rarely incorporated in the curriculum, regardless of subject. As a result, there is a shortage of skills that employers desire. But what makes the scenario complicated is the skewed distribution of engineering college seats in the country.” “The issue is affected by both quality and quantity defects. While technology has been changing fast but curriculum hasn't kept pace, there are no meaningful internships and what is available is far from satisfactory,” Mantha added.
“The issue can be solved by adapting various steps such as Improved teaching quality to monitoring the internship ecosystem. Indian government needs to create new employment markets and close some branches which have lost steam,” added Mantha
Additional data by AICTE also stated that 33% of seats across undergraduate courses in these engineering colleges were vacant in the 2021-22 academic session, whereas the number of unfilled seats was slightly more than 44% in the years 2020-21 and 2019-2020, respectively. The number of seats that were vacant prior to the pandemic was even higher — 48.56% in 2018-19 and 49.14% in 2017-18, respectively.
According to Dr Prasanna Nambiar, principal of The Don Bosco Institute of Technology, this is due to a supply-demand problem and is no different from other reforms of professional education, such as medical, pharmacy, or architecture. Unless we correctly grasp the demand-supply scenario and implement appropriate policies, this issue will persist in the next few years as well.
Gopakumaran Thampi, Principal of Thadomal Sahani Engineering College, noted that due to McKinsey’s early expectations of significant economic growth, consultants encouraged politicians to double the number of Universities and Professional colleges that grew until 2014. However, the anticipated industrial expansion did not occur, with the exception of IT sectors, resulting in a lack of jobs in core engineering areas. As a result, there is a lack of demand for basic engineering branches as well.
According to officials, It is mostly core engineering courses such as civil, electrical, mechanical, and chemical, which are not getting as many takers, as most students want to study computer science, which also offers better job opportunities, in comparison to the core subject areas.
Students were not too shocked at hearing about this new revelation by the AICTE.
According to Ruchi Sharma, a computer science student at Swarnim Startup and Innovation University in Ahmedabad, “The craze for computer science is because of its high end syllabus which gets updated with the ongoing technologies. In the current era, when everything is accessible with a few clicks, there is a greater need for computer science graduates, which broadens our employment opportunities.”
Aastha Agrawal, a BTech in Energy Engineering student at IIT Bombay, has similar thoughts. “Students are lagging behind Computer Science because of the glory of packages they see in the IT sector. However, if one believes that their branch determines everything, they are mistaken; in order to obtain high employment prospects, one must work hard in all core engineering fields.”
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