Can Engineers Catapult India’s Growth Story? Part-5

Q. How relevant and equipped is India’s engineering education to take on the global challenges?
Governments and policy planners have failed miserably in planning to create quality human resource in engineering sector and it is not difficult to find where and what has gone wrong. Most of the state governments have permitted every tom and harry to establish technical institutions in the country in place of corporate houses and other capable organizations. Secondly, large numbers of seats were permitted by AICTE and state government without bothering about the availability of well qualified faculty for which not an action plan was made to bridge the existing numbers of the faculty and estimated requirements. Over the years this gap has increased beyond repair. Private universities have been permitted awarding M.Tech. and Ph.D. degrees from nowhere without competent and qualified staff and further churning out extremely poor quality faculty for private colleges who will spoil the next generation with irreparable loss to the country. Government Universities and colleges have been let down by the babus in the government and many institutions which were role model in this country in the past have been brought to the disrepute. Most of the Universities and college have third rated equipments and laboratories nowhere near to the global competitiveness even they are good for nothing even for the local requirements of the industries.

The system in this country does not support and permit individual excellence due to strong hierarchy and regimentation in the governance we need to do away this system and adopt more transparent and open system.

Q. What interventions are required to create a world class innovation ecosystem in India?
Industry in this country is still thriving on borrowed technology from the western world and this situation has not given much leverage for collaboration between industry and academia. In the past two decades India’s major earning is in the service sector and not from product development and machinery. Our policy planners need to look at this mind set and need to impress upon the industry to play a much bigger role in collaboration and product development through long term research and development activity.

Allow and increase the mobility of faculty between Universities, Research laboratories and Industry to transfer their experiences.

Q. What specific initiatives RTU has taken in this regard ? What have been the definitive outcomes?
In the initial six years RTU has taken big strides in enforcing quality consciousness amongst the college in Rajasthan. Old curricula were revised and environment was created for Post graduation and Ph.D. programmes. Almost more than 1000 students are expected to take admission in the M.Tech. programme this year. Academic initiatives were taken in creating human resource in Petroleum and Aeronautical Engineering at Undergraduate level and in Renewable Energy and Nano-Technology at PG level. Participation of experts from industry has increased in various Boards of study and meaningful inputs are being received. RTU is brainstorming for last more than two years about credit based and grading based system so that student can have flexibility in getting education at his own pace, gets the opportunity for cross border credit transfer and vertical mobility in education and become more innovative and responsible citizen. Still lot is to be done to free the teaching learning system from current rigid system of education and make it student friendly to promote creativity amongst large number of students, possibility of acquiring education at his pace and global credit transfers.

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