Despite the large number — estimated at 1 million per year — of certified engineers India’s 3,400 engineering colleges churn out, there’s growing dissatisfaction within Indian industry and society with their quality, professionalism and productivity. Although it’s now dismissed as a misinterpretation, an infamous Nasscom-McKinsey World Institute study (2005) concluded that 75 percent of our engineering graduates are unemployable by multinational companies. Certainly, Indian engineers have not conceptualised or executed mind-boggling projects of the likes of the railway and motorways under the English Channel, and the Bosphorus Strait which separated Britain from continental Europe and Europe from Asia for thousands of years. And it’s highly doubtful if they can match the capabilities of Chinese engineers who have built the Sino-Tibet railroad which traverses permafrost altitudes rising to 16,000 ft. above sea level, and who have reconstructed and re-engineered China’s megalopolises of Shanghai, Guangdong and Beijing.
In comparison, the best that Indian engineers have done is to build the 741 km Konkan Railway, the 5.6 km Bandra-Worli sea bridge in Mumbai and the Delhi Metro — middling achievements in contemporary engineering. Curiously, for over 60 years India’s engineers have not been able to draft a project design to link the peninsular city of Mumbai, the country’s over-crowded and choking commercial capital, with mainland India — a mere distance of 4.5 km over the Arabian Sea. And India’s crumbling cities defined by convulsive traffic, pot-holed roads and pathetic sanitation are testimony to the inadequate skills of our civil engineers. Of course, it can be argued that development policy failures and policy paralysis at the political level, rather than lack of engineering capability, are the prime factors behind the alleged failure of India’s professional engineers to impact the global imagination with ingenious breakthrough projects. This is no doubt partially true, but the fraternity of engineers is hardly straining at the leash.
Undoubtedly, among the country’s 3,400 engineering and 355 medical and other professional education colleges, there are islands of excellence. The EW league tables rate and rank these leader institutions across several parameters of academic excellence. This perceptual survey is based upon the institutional assessments of knowledgeable respondents carefully chosen by our partner, the Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company, C fore. The objective of this elaborate (and expensive) annual exercise is not only to aid and enable students to shortlist, if not select, institutions of professional education best suited to their aspirations and aptitudes, but also to inspire institutional managements to continuously improve teaching-learning and research standards to move up the annual league tables. Indeed, the national interest demands it.
