Why are Indian engineers not employable? IIT heads blame poor infra

An average of 1.5 million graduate engineers pass out every year in India

What do the heads of the country’s top tech institutes think about the debate around employability of Indian engineering graduates? 

There is indeed a real concern about employability because of the large number of Indian engineering students graduating ever year, outdated curriculum, poor teaching infrastructure and a shortage of good faculty, said IIT directors, according to a report published by The Economic Times.

Recently, a survey had claimed that 95 per cent of engineers in the country are not fit to take up software development jobs. The study had further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write functionally correct and efficient code. According to the study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77 per cent candidates could write the correct logic for a programme — a minimum requirement for any programming job.

However, industry veterans T V Mohandas Pai and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw had slammed the report. 

Last month, Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) Chairman, Deepak Parekh had also said that an average of 1.5 million graduate engineers pass out every year, but four-fifth of them were not employable due to lack of adequate skills, despite having more than 3,300 approved engineering colleges in the country.

The onus of bringing out quality engineers lies not on the students, most of who come into the system with the intention to learn, but on the institutes, says Indranil Manna, director at IIT-Kanpur.

“We need good teachers, good labs and infrastructure. That is not available in a majority of the institutes beyond a few at the top. Blame the system which has allowed so many institutes of questionable quality to mushroom”, further says the ET report.
 

The main problems, said Gautam Biswas, director at IIT-Guwahati, were inappropriate curriculum, poor syllabi, inadequate laboratory infrastructure and a shortage of quality human resources for teaching. Attention should be focused on all these areas while institutes without adequate teaching support may seek help from industry experts through special seminar or lectures, he suggested.