Indian Engineering Education has applied the 80/20 rule. Where 20% of engineering graduates lead us to celebrate all that works in Indian engineering education. Did you know that 80% of Indian Engineering graduates are considered unemployable? That means roughly half-million engineering students don’t have jobs when they graduate every year which is a result of a very inefficient and unstable system. Who is responsible for this mismatch of degrees and competencies? We can blame the government, private engineering college agreed that charges hundreds of thousand Rupees in fees but doesn’t prepare students or perhaps blames the students for their lack of motivation to study?
In 2007, with initial funding of $1 Million from successful global Indians like Narayana Murthy, Co-founder of Infosys, Desh Deshpande, Founder of Sycamore Networks and Arjun Malhotra, Co-founder of HCL Technologies I brought together 52 professors from US universities and 1100 from Indian engineering colleges faculty to Infosys’ Mysore campus for 46 workshops of 5-days each to discuss best practices in teaching and research in their field.
Since then, we have hosted more than 200 in person one-week long workshops hosted by US-based professors for India based faculty on latest in engineering education pedagogy. We conduct webinars every week on various engineering education topics and have trained 8000 faculties in private engineering colleges in India. As a result of these faculty now research and publish papers on various engineering topics and have started applying the latest pedagogy principles to their classes. Claire Komives, a professor at San Jose State University who has worked with IUCEE for number of years and goes to India every year to host our certification classes says, “These engineering colleges are spread in remote parts of India, have faculty that struggle financially due to salary mandates from the government, have to teach a curriculum – often outdated – mandated from other universities, and yet are full of students who have ambitions and talents to make India be the technology leader of the world.”
I believe a lot of the success of software engineering is a result of hardworking, inexpensive Indian software engineering talent. Do some research into the trendsetting startups disrupting the world and you will find Indian software engineers behind them. But is that enough?
India has myriad of problems like water shortage, pollution, healthcare, regional tensions and I believe solutions to these problems are to be found in India, led by Indians. Along with the problems, there are ambitious programs launched by the current government like Make in India, Digital India etc that demand the best from Indian engineering and technology talent. What we do at IUCEE is to help prepare this talent.
Credit – Education times
