FOLLOWING THE historic sweep of the Jayalalithaa-led All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections in which the party won 37 of the 39 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu, on May 17 — the day after the election results were announced — the AIADMK went to town across the state (pop. 72 million) with four full-page advertisements in several newspapers including The Hindu and The Times of India extolling the mighty achievements of her three-year-old government. The advertising blitz, which highlighted the welfare measures and freebies including mixers, grinders, fans and laptops doled out to 8.9 million poor households with an outlay of Rs.4,380.20 crore, also lauded the accomplishments of the AIADMK government in several sectors of the economy including education.
However, a reality check of the three-year-old government’s performance, especially in higher education, has unearthed several inconvenient truths. According to the Times of India which filed an RTI application with the directorate of technical education recently, only four of the 10 government engineering colleges and 24 of 41 government polytechnics in Tamil Nadu have full-time principals.
Moreover there are only 33 professors against a sanctioned strength of 50 and a shortage of 130 assistant professors in the state’s 10 government engineering colleges. In the state’s 41 polytechnics, there are just seven heads of department against the sanctioned strength of 141 with 993 lecturers’ posts lying vacant. Unsurprisingly the 1:15 teacher-student ratio for engineering colleges and 1:20 for polytechnics mandated by the Delhi-based All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE), has been reduced to a cruel joke.
“While engineering colleges in the state have multiplied, there’s a huge shortage of qualified faculty as we are unable to produce postgraduates and Ph Ds. Only 10-20 percent of the over 200,000 engineering graduates who emerge from the state’s 560 engineering colleges annually opt for teaching, with most preferring to work in industry. Moreover, there’s rampant corruption in appointments of vice chancellors and faculty in state universities while politically connected private managements are not accountable to anybody. With the state government unwilling to fill up vacancies, poorly remunerated faculty hired on contract or hourly basis earn Rs.10,000-12,000 per month in government and private engineering colleges. Neither is it a secret that the posts of professors in government colleges are auctioned for large sums of money,” says V. Balaguruswamy, former vice chancellor, Anna University.
Unsurprisingly, the poor quality of education dispensed in the majority of engineering colleges in the state has hit students hard. According to The National Employability Report 2011 — prepared by the employability assessment company Aspiring Minds which tested 55,000 students from over 250 colleges countrywide on aptitudes, communication and technical skills — only 10 percent of engineering graduates from Tamil Nadu are employable in the organised sector. Shockingly, the report places Tamil Nadu which has the second largest pool of engineering graduates countrywide (after Andhra Pradesh) at the bottom of the list of 16 states surveyed.
“Engineering graduates in Tamil Nadu lack industry-relevant skills because college curriculums are theoretical and totally unconnected with industry needs. In addition to insufficient technical skills and practical training, fresh engineering graduates also lack English communication skills. The faculty of most colleges is ignorant of industry requirements and lack domain knowledge and presentation skills. With a majority of the institutions delivering substandard education, graduates inevitably face unemployment,” says the director of human resources of an IT company in Chennai.
Quite clearly, faculty quality and availability are critical to raising falling standards of engineering education in this fast-industrialising state. However, to attain this objective the state government and private college managements need to cooperate and collaborate to upskill faculty, reduce procedural delays in appointing teachers, bridge the wide gap between pay packets offered by engineering colleges and industry, while providing incentives to retain staff. But that’s a tall order for the ruling AIADMK government whose prime interest is to distribute freebies.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)