Although some engineering education institutions — notably the IITs — enjoy great national and even offshore reputations, India’s 3,400 engineering institutes have not been able to produce graduates technically equipped to conceptualise and execute monumental engineering projects
EDUCATIONWORLD’S second rating and ranking league tables of India’s most highly regarded non-IIT engineering colleges are being published against a grim backdrop of sustained low annual rates of jobless industrial growth. For almost three years consecutively, the official index of industrial production has been almost static. According to T.N. Ninan, consulting editor of the Business Standard, the industrial production index was 170.3 in 2011-12. “Two years later, the index for the first 11 months of 2013-14 stands fractionally lower, at 170.0. If we go by the index, we have had zero industrial growth compared to two years ago. The manufacturing sub-sector of ‘industry’ has seen zero growth or a fall in output in 15 of the last 24 months,” he writes (BS, April 19). Moreover, the country’s current account deficit (goods and services imports minus exports) which had widened to 6.5 percent of GDP in 2011-12, and according to Union finance minister P. Chidambaram has been reduced to 2.3 percent in the period April-December 2013, is testimony to the preference of domestic consumers for foreign manufactured goods over Indian brands.
A host of factors including policy paralysis and backtracking on the country’s economic liberalisation and deregulation programme begun in 1991, during the Congress-led UPA-II government’s second five-year term in office — apart from loss of competitive capability of India’s engineers in industry and manufacturing — could be contributory causes of the decline in industrial growth momentum. Yet the ground reality that the Indian market is flooded with imports — which can’t be banned because of WTO (World Trade Organisation) treaty obligations — ranging from chocolates, to automobiles and heavy industry equipment, is visible proof of the uncompetitiveness of Indian industry and its declining engineering capability. Better proof is provided by the defence services which are wholly dependent upon imported equipment and armaments. An indigenously developed jet fighter, tank and aircraft carrier have been in the works for decades without much to show for heavy investment.
Quite clearly, although some engineering education institutions — especially the six pioneer Indian Institutes of Technology (the first of which (IIT-Kharagpur) was established in 1951 with Soviet assistance) and whose number has since grown to 16 — have great national and even offshore reputations, India’s 3,400 engineering colleges/universities have not been able to produce graduates technically equipped to conceptualise and execute monumental engineering projects (except perhaps in space engineering) which attract global headlines.
On the other hand, engineers in other countries, even newly-emergent nations, have successfully executed projects of great ingenuity and expertise which have not only stunned the world, but also hugely benefited their economies. For instance in recent years, British engineers have built a railway under the English channel which has connected the European mainland with the British Isles. A similar rail link under the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey — which has separated the European mainland from Asia for millennia — was opened to the public last October while the Eurasia road tunnel is scheduled for completion in 2016. China’s clever engineers, in a marvel of modern engineering, have connected the plains of China to mountainous Tibet by building the world’s highest (1,956 km) railway chugging 16,000 ft above sea level.
In his insufficiently acclaimed book A Great Clamour: Encounters with China and its Neighbours (2013), India-born writer Pankaj Mishra who took a ride some years ago on the Beijing-Lhasa railroad, provides a graphic description of the detailed engineering expertise invested by Chinese engineers in the world’s most elevated railway. “The new Chinese service from Beijing to Lhasa runs on the highest railroad in the world. Traversing a region known for earthquakes, low atmospheric pressure, the railroad which cost $4.2 billion (Rs.25,000 crore) to build is an extraordinary feat of modern engineering — perhaps even as the former premier Zhu Rongji has claimed ‘an unprecedented project in the history of mankind’. In two days, the train brings you to a region that thwarted the boldest travelers and explorers of the past,” writes Mishra.
Nor is the Sino-Tibetan railway a one-off flash-in-the-pan showcase Chinese project. Indian visitors to the People’s Republic return awe-struck by the extent to which Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong have been modernised and re-engineered, even as alarming reports of the imminent collapse of India’s 7,900 major towns and cities characterised by traffic chaos, potholed roads, and archaic sewage and sanitation systems are routinely published in the media. On the other hand, Indian engineers, lagging behind their Chinese rivals, are incapable of building a 3 km bridge over the sea linking Mumbai to the mainland, which would provide huge relief to the over-crowded, choking commercial capital. Perhaps the only notable civic engineering feats of post-independence India are the 5.6 km Bandra-Worli sea-link in Mumbai, the 762 km Konkan Railway along the western coast, and the Delhi metro railway network. But these are modest engineering projects by global standards.
THE INABILITY OF INDIA’S estimated 12 million engineers’ pool — often acclaimed as the world’s largest — to impact themselves upon the global community with innovative start-ups and projects demonstrating high-tech contemporary capability, has cast a shadow of doubt over the quality of technical education being delivered in the country’s 3,400 engineering colleges and universities.
There’s widespread and growing suspicion that their syllabuses, curriculums, research capability and faculty are substandard, not only by the norms of Western academia but also in comparison with engineering education institutes in other BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, and perhaps even with newly-industrialised nations such as Indonesia and Vietnam among others.
In 2005, a Nasscom-McKinsey World Institute study which concluded that 75 percent of Indian engineering graduates are unfit for employment in multinational companies caused widespread consternation in Indian industry and society, even if not in indolent Indian academia. Although Nasscom spokespersons claim the conclusions of the study were misinterpreted by the media, even today captains of industry continue to be disillusioned with the quality and industry-readiness of the country’s engineering graduates.
“The plain truth is that the curriculums and faculty of India’s best engineering colleges and institutes — IITs included — are so lax that there’s no way our engineers can execute great projects like the China-Tibet railway, English Channel tunnel and the Eurosia link under the Bosphorus. The Indian reality is that the IITs train students to execute medium-challenge projects such as the Bandra-Worli sea-link and Konkan Railway which anyway were completed years behind schedule, while the remaining 3,000-plus engineering colleges prepare them to build shoddy PWD-style projects. Even our much acclaimed IT engineers are engaged in low-end code writing, systems management and maintenance work, with no smart invention or app having emerged from India’s over-hyped IT industry. The graduates — including postgrads — we get from Indian engineering colleges are of such poor quality that we have to spend lakhs training them, and even then their productivity is nowhere near that of American, Chinese and Japanese engineers, because their fundamentals are weak,” says the chief executive of one of the country’s largest infrastructure construction companies, who opined on condition of anonymity.
It’s against this depressing scenario that last year, EducationWorld initiated the rating and ranking of India’s top non-IIT engineering colleges. The purpose of this annual exercise is to not only furnish useful institutional information to the great majority of the 500,000 higher secondary school-leavers, who write the tough IIT-JEE national exam every summer but don’t make the 98 percentile cut of the mere 10,000 who are admitted into the heavily-subsidised IITs, but also to provide feedback about the relative merits of the next best engineering colleges on seven parameters of academic excellence. The expectation is that the league tables will spur competitiveness between the institutions ranked in our survey, and enable their managements and faculty to upgrade and improve learning outcomes.
With this objective in mind, we commissioned the highly-reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore) to constitute a sample respondents database comprising 1,036 engineering faculty and 1,220 final year students, to rate engineering colleges of which they have adequate knowledge, on seven parameters of academic excellence given differing weights by faculty interviewees viz, competence of faculty (weight: 350), faculty welfare and development (200), research and innovation (300), pedagogic systems and processes (250), industry interface (300), placements (200), and infrastructure and facilities (300). The rating scores awarded under each parameter by sample respondents were totaled to determine the ranking of institutions interse.
“Not more than one faculty member from a department/college was interviewed, and ratings faculty gave to their own institutes were disregarded. Moreover, colleges and institutes not evaluated by at least 25 faculty and 25 students were eliminated from the league tables,” says Premchand Palety, promoter-director of C fore (estb. 2000) who deployed a task force of 150 field researchers nationwide to conduct this survey.
ALTHOUGH LEAGUE TABLES rating and ranking the country’s better engineering, medical and professional colleges are not a new phenomenon, knowledgeable industry insiders and monitors of the economy believe they serve the useful purpose of beaming a spotlight on academic institutions, forcing them to introspect and raise teaching, learning and research standards. “The publication of such performance rating surveys has prompted managements of progressive engineering colleges and universities to improve their interface with industry, and tie up with leading corporates to ensure industry orientation and readiness of students right from the first year of college. Such sustained partnerships improve the quality and employability of students and help bridge the gap between industry requirements and traditional academic curriculums,” says Hema Ravichander, an alumna of IIM-Ahmedabad, former director of human resources at Infosys Technologies, and currently a Bangalore-based HRD consultant..gif)
Anand Sudarshan, an alumnus of NIT-Trichy and hitherto chief executive of the Manipal/Bangalore-based Manipal Global Education Services — India’s premier education multinational — and currently promoter-director of the Bangalore-based Sylvant Advisors Pvt. Ltd, agrees that publication of institutional league tables has aided the process of closing the quality gap between the IITs and the country’s next-best engineering colleges/institutes. “There’s growing quality consciousness in the best non-IIT engineering colleges which are benchmarking themselves with the prime IITs. With the supply-demand situation for engineering graduates having changed drastically, there’s incremental connect between the best non-IIT institutions and Indian industry in crafting curriculums, joint research and graduate recruitment. A rising number of engineering colleges are becoming deeply conscious about delivering high quality education to students, placing them appropriately and tracking their careers. These are very positive developments,” says Sudarshan.
Given the small number of graduates churned out by the IITs annually relative to the needs of Indian industry and the economy, the quality of graduates produced by the country’s next-best engineering institutes is of critical importance for the growth and development as also total factor productivity of India Inc. Against this backdrop of growing apprehension that Indian engineers and technical professionals lack the cutting-edge skills to compete for customers in the fast-crystallising global marketplace, the quality of engineers being shaped in technical colleges and institutes across the spectrum is no longer a subject of academic debate, but of national competitiveness and perhaps even survival.
In this context we present our second EW India non-IIT Engineering Colleges Rankings 2014.
To read India’s best non IIT Engineering colleges 2014 visit http://www.educationworld.in/rank-engineering/2014.html