Expert Comment

Technical capability illusion

A large number of middle class Indians tend to exult in the statistic that the country hosts the world’s third largest technical work force. The fact is we probably have the largest number of plumbers, carpenters, masons, welders, house painters etc. Yet as any home owner will swear, the quality of plumbing, carpentry, masonry or welding services is abysmal. Unfortunately what is true of lower end technical manpower is also true of higher end technical manpower. The half a dozen IITs and a handful of other technical institutions combined constitute a minuscule tip of a massive technical education iceberg submerged in a sea of mediocrity.

The plain truth is that the great majority of institutions that pass for contemporary India’s engineering colleges produce graduates who are hardly employable in the domestic market, let alone internationally. Why are the great majority of our technical institutions of higher learning in indifferent health? What policy interventions are required to revitalise them? What are the management challenges in raising the floor level of our technical education? These questions need to be addressed and answered in the public interest.

India hosts an estimated 1,300 engineering colleges. Together they graduate 500,000-600,000 engineers every year. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) mandates a teacher-pupil ratio of 1:15. This translates into a 33,000-40,000 faculty requirement.

If we accept a 5 percent faculty attrition rate conservatively, on an average we need 1,650-2,000 new faculty every year in our engineering colleges. Ideally, if our engineering colleges were truly institutions of higher learning, the new teachers ought to be Ph Ds. But sadly, India produces less than 450 Ph Ds in technology annually. Of these 450 Ph Ds, half are not employable as teachers because of poor communication skills, if not knowledge base. Half of the remaining prefer to go abroad or into industry. Thus, of the 450 Ph Ds produced, the supply available to engineering colleges annually is barely 100-125 against a requirement of around 1,600-2,000!

Why is our annual output of Ph Ds so low? Because India has never been a technology research-oriented country. This is evidenced by the fact that even today, much of what passes for ‘innovation’ or ‘research’ in India is little more than recycled versions of research conducted elsewhere in the world. Little wonder that typically higher engineering education (M. Tech and Ph D) has remained a way of postponing unemployment.

But over the years, as alternative careers opened up in management, information technology, software, BPO etc, the need for postponement of unemployment has reduced and hence the number of M.Techs and Ph Ds has also dwindled. Today almost every undergraduate engineer, if he/ she is any good, wants immediate employment or enrollment in a B-school. That’s also the reason why even in IITs, one hardly ever finds an IIT graduate working for his or her Masters or doctorate. Most such scholars are from lesser engineering colleges, typically from smaller towns.

There are several motivators behind this situation. Unlike technology driven countries such as Germany, Japan, or even Italy, the discrepancy in the pay packages of engineers in the ‘old’ industries and ‘new’ engineering industry is huge. Even greater is the discrepancy between plain vanilla engineers and engineering-cum-management graduates who quite often end up selling soaps, shampoos, loans and equities. In addition, given the low status of R&D in Indian industry, little value addition is derived by corporates hiring M.Techs and Ph Ds. When these sub-standard M.Techs and Ph Ds don’t receive attractive job offers from industry, they take to teaching.

Other dynamics are also at play. In recent decades, fluency in the English language has become a pre-requisite of employment. This is as much on account of joint ventures as because of BPO type operations, where English language fluency is non-negotiable. And yet, our fragmented education policy in the states has stubbornly refused to take this reality into account.

Consequently undergraduate students in India’s 1,300 engineering colleges are mostly taught by sub-standard B.Techs and M.Techs with inadequate English language communication skills. And in a vast majority of our engineering institutions, it is these sub-standard grads, postgrads and Ph Ds who enter the world of higher academia and produce even more mediocre engineers with grad, postgrad or Ph D degrees.

The fallout is obvious. While we boast the world’s third largest technical manpower, Indian industry is starved of skilled or adequately prepared engineers. The IT industry alone has projected a huge demand of some 300,000-400,000 engineers in the next three to five years. The manufacturing sector is starved of quality, if not quantity of technical manpower. R&D is virtually zero. Meanwhile we foolishly project India as an elephant in the process of waking up.