India engineering:The downfall of the pedigree of Indian children is a noteworthy revolution. In the wake of the early ’90s, you could ask any parent in the metropolitan cities what their children aspire to become and you’d hear the unanimous reply, ‘Engineer‘ or ‘Doctor‘.
Engineering in India
There are currently more than 3,500 engineering colleges across the country, and about 90% of graduates do not have the programming skills to work in software engineering, according to one study.
The best jobs are reserved for graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), the crown jewels of the country’s higher education system.
Every April, over a million students, take the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the primary pathway to the IITs. There are fewer than 12 thousand seats at the 16 IITs in India, and they accept one in 50 applicants each year.
(The University of Oxford, by comparison, takes one in six.) To accommodate everybody else, in the early 2000s, India’s government began accrediting hundreds of new engineering colleges. But standards were lax.
Private colleges save up to a third of their seats for students willing to pay fees ranging from $15,000 to $35,000 for admission. According to Rituparna Chakraborty, cofounder of the human-resources firm TeamLease Services Ltd.,
“Quality was compromised in pursuit of quantity.”
The situation only worsens, as an announcement in February came where the AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education) a regulatory body that looks over technical institutions that it won’t be accrediting institutions till 2022.
A shocking report by The Hindu stated that,
“Qualified engineers in Chennai are applying for the posts of parking attendants along with candidates who have just finished their tenth grade due to lack of suitable employment opportunities”.
The unemployment rate in India stands at 7.5 percent for the period between September and December 2019, as per the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) data.
However, the unemployment rate for graduates is at 18.5 percent, more than twice the headline rate, according to data.
“This was the seventh consecutive wave to record an increase in the unemployment rate since May-August 2017 when the unemployment rate was 3.8 per cent,”
the report said.
The economy is progressing towards recession and young graduates fresh out of college find it close to impossible to find employment if they are not placed through their campuses.
Numerous interviews were conducted with engineers who were qualified but are involuntarily unemployed due to the oversupply of engineers produced in the country by any accredited universities with low standards that don’t equip the students for the industry.
Most of them stated that the choice to become an engineer was due to the “social pressure” from the relatives and friends of the family.
The American dream paved its way to India in the pre-liberalization stage post-1991 when the fastest way to go settle in ‘the States’ was to get an engineering degree.
The middle class of India has spent lakhs on coaching their kids from as young as fourteen to crack the IIT-JEE and AIEEE exams to win a seat in privileged institutions such as IITs and BITS.
Shakespeare rightly said, Times- are a-changing’ and it is proven by the large unemployment rate among qualified engineers.
As a modern society, we must thrive to encourage our kids to explore the various fields available in the industry and not be a pre-2010s stereotype.
Kids these days are passionate about commerce and arts and theatre studies which have paved ways for new sectors to enter an IT dominated industry.
In the fourth quarter of 2020, we expect to see the economy to pick some growth post the pandemic.
