BITTER TRUTH OF ENGINEERING IN INDIA

Real engineers are problem solvers.  They are given the tools only to help them solve problems using all the knowledge of physics, materials, electricity, fluids, thermodynamics, and various other subjects that must in their heads all come together.  The vast majority of engineering graduates from India will not be able to solve any real world problems.

There was a recent study that showed how many Indian engineering students are employable. Majority of engineering graduates not employable: Experts

Clueless engineers: National Employability Report reveals how unemployable fresh engineering graduates are

The problem with having to train graduates is that there are many with good marks obtained by the usual methods, where learning a subject is not necessary, leave alone knowing it well enough to apply what you know.

India has forgotten all about "scientific temper" and does not apply itself scientifically to even the simplest problems it needs to solve.  India's construction standards, for instance, are well over fifty years old.  With all the new materials available now, why not set new standards?  The USA's standards are upgraded sometimes more than once a year!

The vast majority of Indian engineering colleges produce herds that usually go nowhere.  Some years ago, they knew enough to be somewhat readily employed.  Now, even that is gone, and the numbers of graduates have increased.  End result: Clueless mass of people with useless degrees.

To clean the Ganges, Indian engineers could not come up with any sort of plan.  So, India had to call in some experts from Europe.  To clean the Cooum river in Chennai, same thing.

Most of the "projects" that Indian engineering students put together as part of their curriculum in order to graduate are simply copied from other colleges, who copied from somewhere else.  This whole "project" nonsense is a hypocritical racket.

There are exceptions, but a great number of the staff members in engineering colleges are also uncaring people.  Zero passion and just know how to spit out the "syllabus".  They can hardly get students enthused about the amazing things they should do as engineers.

India has no culture of innovation either.  But there is no shortage of blowing their horns.  As soon as someone comes out with a functioning tablet, some stupid hype of an "iPad killer" is sure to follow.  Indian engineers in very small numbers can function at the cutting edge of engineering and innovation.

For how long has India supported the damn Hindustan Aeronautics Limited?  Well over 50 years.  They have not made a single plane Air India or Indian Airlines can use.  Forget about the Indian Air Force.  India has not made a single functional jet engine on its own design.  The engine that HAL came up with for the much touted LCA (Light Combat Aircraft) simply did not produce the thrust to push the damn plane.  So now, it's getting a foreign engine!  Why did India even waste its time with its engineers?

There are standouts like the ISRO, that has somehow managed to put together interdisciplinary engineering teams for its successful space research and exploration program.  But on the other side of the coin, India's trains have gained only 10% in average speed over the last thirty years.

Ashok Leyland and Tata have been making buses for a very long time and continue to do so.  Guess who makes the buses of choice on Indian roads today?  Volvo and Mercedes Benz.  How hard can it be to make a fast, comfortable bus?  Pretty hard, apparently.

India's engineers can work on very specific projects that someone else puts together, when they are assigned specific tasks after training for those tasks.  Taken fresh from college, companies will be lucky if they don't burn the canteen and crash the elevator.

A million engineers in India struggling to get placed in an extremely challenging market.

Somewhere between a fifth to a third of the million students graduating out of India's engineering colleges run the risk of being unemployed. Others will take jobs well below their technical qualifications in a market where there are few jobs for India's overflowing technical talent pool. Beset by a flood of institutes (offering a varying degree of education) and a shrinking market for their skills, India's engineers are struggling to subsist in an extremely challenging market.

According to multiple estimates, India trains around 1.5 million engineers, which is more than the US and China combined. However, two key industries hiring these engineers -- information technology and manufacturing -- are actually hiring fewer people than before.

For example, India's IT industry, a sponge for 50-75% of these engineers will hire 50,000 fewer people this year, according to Nasscom. Manufacturing, too, is facing a similar stasis, say HR consultants and skills evaluation firms.

According to data from AICTE, the regulator for technical education in India, there were 1,511 engineering colleges across India, graduating over 550,000 students back in 2006-07. Fuelled by fast growth, especially in the $110 billion outsourcing market, a raft of new colleges sprung up -- since then, the number of colleges and graduates have doubled.

Job Problems...

Jobs have, however, failed to keep pace. "The entire ecosystem has been built around feeding the IT industry," says Kamal Karanth, managing director of Kelly Services, a global HR consultancy.

"But, the business model of IT companies has changed...customers are asking for more. The crisis is very real today." Placement numbers across institutes -- including tier-I colleges such as IIT Bombay -- have mirrored these struggles.

In 2012-13, in IIT Bombay, a total of 1,501 students opted to go through the placement process. At the time of writing, only 1,005 had been placed (placements are currently underway in the institute).

In 2011-12, 1,060 of the 1,389 students were placed. Further down the pecking order, at the Amity School of Engineering and Technology, placements are muted. The number of companies visiting is down from 86 last year to 67 in 2013 at the time of writing (placements are currently underway).

Batch sizes have reduced drastically at its Noida campus this year, with 365 students placed so far in a batch size of 459, compared to 1,032 being placed in a batch size of 1,160 last year.

"Some companies have delayed the joining dates of students who passed out last year and they are still waiting to be placed," says Ajay Rana, director, Amity Technical Placement Centre. "We can expect joining dates of students who passed out this year to be deferred by a minimum of six months."

...Trickle Down

This muddled equation is now showing signs of social and economic strain across the country. Frustrated engineers are taking jobs for which they are overqualified and, therefore, underpaid.

A few exceptions have even turned to crime. According to media reports, Manjunath Reddy, a civil engineer, turned to chain snatching in Thane, a suburb of Mumbai, to support his young family. While he used some money to buy a small flat in peripheral Mumbai, his failure to net a job drove him to crime, he told the police when caught.

Like him, another engineer in Aurangabad turned to car lifting as a route to easy money. "The social aspect of this massive under-employment and unemployment will soon be witnessed," warns Pratik Kumar, HR chief of Wipro and chief executive of its infrastructure engineering unit.

Hiring is slowing down because recruiters are changing their strategy. "An engineering degree is a poor proxy for your education and employment skills," says Manish Sabharwal, chairman of TeamLease, a temp staffing firm.

"The world of work is evolving... employers increasingly don't care what you know, they focus on what you can do with that knowledge." While dozens of new institutes have been established in the past six or eight years, he claims that over a third of them are empty and perhaps they are "worth more dead (for the real estate they sit on) than alive."

A global economic slowdown may have only worsened what is already a bad problem, say others such as Amit Bansal, co-founder of Purple Leap, a skills assessment firm, which routinely gauges the capabilities of students across these institutes.

"Even without this slowdown, there are a large number of students who won't get a job," he says. Bansal estimates that, at best, there are 150,000-200,000 jobs generated annually in the Indian economy and far too many engineers attacking this labour pool.

What's more, India's technical talent pool is also warped, with almost the same number of engineers as technical graduates from institutes such as ITI. "In developed markets, there is usually one engineer for every ten," says Bansal. This skew is only compounding the woes of engineers in India.

Engineering In India

Engineering padicha nalla future means -If you study engineering, you will have a good future.

 This is a claim often repeated to children and teenagers by parents and teachers in many parts of India.But only those who have gone through an engineering college life know that it's not completely true. This blog is about the few engineering students in your class who love engineering, I don't hate them. Infact, I'm very jealous that they study what they love. this blog is about the majority of engineering graduates whose lives are wasted in engineering and is intended to tell why you should make an attempt in pursuing you real passion, instead if being suffocated under the weight of an engineering degree.
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In other countries if Mr.Gupta had studies electrical engineering,you will find me working with an electrical firm. But Unfortunately In India, If you are a Engineering Graduate most likely you would be doing something else.