Employability of engineers exaggerated, but still a concern, says IIT directors

There’s been an on-and-off debate around employability of Indian engineering graduates, with a recent report suggesting that as much as 95% of Indian engineering graduates are unfit for programming jobs.

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The directors of Indian Institutes of Technology, the esteemed institutions for engineering studies, consider these claims to be exaggerated, but think that the issue is still a concern.

As per IIT directors that ET spoke to, the concern arises because of the large number of engineering students that graduate from Indian colleges every year, outdated curriculum that they are made to study, as well as poor teaching infrastructure and shortage of good faculty in institutes that are not premium or much reputed.

"The country is producing as many as 10 lakh engineers a year. There needs to be a serious review," said Indranil Manna, director at IIT-Kanpur. "Do we really need so many engineers? Are there that many jobs?"

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He, however, added that it’s not the students’ fault, since most of them join the courses with the intention to learn. However, several institutes lack good teachers, good labs and infrastructure. For this, the system needs to be blamed, which allows so many institutes of questionable quality to blossom.

V Ramgopal Rao, director of IIT Delhi, shares Manna’s view, agreeing that India is seeing an overproduction of engineers, but an overwhelming majority of them can’t be called unemployable.

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"Our job is to produce graduates who are broadbased and who can be trained for a given job. Not to be so narrowly focused that they can only do one kind of job. We must strengthen our ITI and polytechnic diploma education by incorporating a significant hands-on training component," Rao suggested.

One can also think of Indian parents’ fascination to see their kids becoming engineers as the reason behind the overproduction of engineers. While some high-performers from top IITs get high packages, the same is not the case with most fresh graduates from institutes not counted as premium. This also forces many fresh engineers to take up jobs unrelated to engineering.

"There is no doubt that this (debate over employability) is not applicable to IITs, NITs, some notable CFTIs such as the IIITs, IIEST, IIST, etc. Some leading state universities including Jadavpur University and Anna University colleges are imparting very high-quality education as are private institutes such as BITS, VIT, Amity and SRM, among others," said Gautam Biswas, director at IIT-Guwahati.

He added that there are concerns about some colleges that are not able to raise their qualities and standards.

IIT-Bombay director Devang Khakhar said that no student is ready to immediately join the industry right from the campus. They need to be trained before they can be sent to work.

On the surveys claiming 95% of Indian engineers unfit for jobs, he said, "if the situation was that dire, so many IT companies wouldn't be recruiting in such large numbers."