The Hindu Business Line : C.N.R. Rao laments fetish for low-end engineering courses

One of India’s best-known scientists, Prof C.N.R. Rao, has lamented the trend among the brightest talent in the country to seek out engineering courses merely to serve the needs of low-level technology and service industry.

A large number of these students who are made to pursue poorly conceived courses is now increasingly becoming unemployable, Prof Rao said while delivering a lecture for school students here recently on ‘Celebration of Chemistry,’ organised by the Foundation for Capacity Building in Science.

Prof Rao is the National Research Professor and Honorary President and Linus Pauling Research Professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bangalore.

SURPLUS NUMBERS

Engineering colleges in the country are producing more than six lakh engineers each year while all the universities in the US put together rolled out only 80,000 a year. It is high time that the country re-oriented its strategy on higher education and research so as to rise to the stature it deserved among world nations.

“In my State, Karnataka, every MLA is starting an engineering college of his own. If the youngsters give themselves to be misguided by their elders into believing that engineering is the only area of hope, India could well end up as a second grade nation eve as China and others marched ahead,” Prof Rao said.

Basic science and advanced research in pure science disciplines are badly in need of dedicated involvement of bright young people in the country, especially at a time when revolutionary developments are taking place in those areas all over.

“China was behind us 10 or 15 years ago in terms of research in advanced science. But that country is now marching ahead and has produced 10 times the number of research papers in nanotechnology than India produced last year,” he said.

Only 0.5 per cent of the research papers published by international science journals come from India against China’s share of 2.5 per cent and the US’s 63 per cent, Prof Rao said.

However, he did not want to underrate any of the achievements India had made in the recent years, including the Chandrayaan Mission.

India could take on any country in terms of brain power but the country’s talent needs to be harnessed the best way possible just as China is trying to do, he added.