Engineering crisis

On May 8, a woman in Hyderabad was accused of hiring a Hyderabad-based gang of criminals to murder her husband. That she paid them with her wedding ring was bizarre enough, but what proved even more shocking was the discovery that the ‘gang’ was a bunch of unemployed BTech graduates.

Yes, you find them in the unlikeliest places. Even the recently concluded recruitment camp of Mumbai Police saw 433 engineering graduates among the two lakh vying for the 1,137 vacancies. As news of layoffs become routine, and hirings freeze over, a degree — even the coveted engineering one — is no longer the promised ticket to employment.

On April 22, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the statutory body tasked with the development of technical colleges, announced it would reduce the number of engineering seats by 1.67 lakh countrywide. The intake this year will be 14.9 lakh, the sharpest fall in the last five years. Colleges that have been unable to fill 30 per cent of their seats for the last five years, will have to halve their capacity. This reduced capacity will be further halved if 30 per cent seats go unfilled in the coming year. Some colleges had approached the AICTE to volunatarily reduce the number of seats or to stop functioning from this year.

Currently the country adds around 10 lakh persons to its workforce each month according to data provided by the labour ministry. On the other hand, only 0.26 lakh new jobs are created each month. Annually, about 15 lakh engineers graduate, according to an AICTE official. The IT sector is no longer the big employer it was in the early 2000s, so the available pool of engineers is way bigger than the demand, even as Gen Z gears up for higher education. And to think that until even a couple of years ago, practically every middle-class Indian family pushed its children to become either a doctor or an engineer. The medical profession may have seemed more daunting in terms of the time and money involved, so parents saw engineering as a sure-shot ticket to an established job. That is now changing slowly, but surely.

Join the queue: The country adds 10-15 lakh persons to its workforce each month, while creating only 0.26 lakh new jobs

“I would say it is a failure on the part of our engineering colleges that we have ended up with so many engineers,” says Akshaya Tripathi, 25, who studied computer engineering at a private university in Hoshiarpur, Punjab. Unemployed for a year and a half, she is now trying for a bank job. Did she want to study engineering? “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I had decent marks in science, and opted for computer science in my board exams, and it was a natural progression from there.”

Far from employable

A few years ago, a McKinsey report found that only a quarter of engineers in India were actually employable. In specific fields such as mechanical engineering, the employability stood at a mere five per cent. Old syllabi, poor infrastructure, and other systemic problems have meant that their skills, and jobs, are being rapidly overtaken by artificial intelligence technology. More recent studies have seen the employability rate dip further below 20 per cent. Aspiring Minds, an employability assessment firm, recently reported that 95 per cent of Indian engineers cannot code. This is particularly worrying since a chunk of the engineers are employed in the IT sector. This statistic is also a pointer to why the manufacturing sector hasn’t progressed despite government impetus, including the Make in India programme. While graduates from leading engineering colleges such as the IITs still command a premium in the job market, it is the employability of the thousands of graduates from other engineering colleges and technical institutes that is under question.

Prof R Hariharan, an advisor to AICTE, pinpoints the problem — lack of quality teachers and infrastructure at many of these institutions. Few colleges are willing to pay teachers a salary comparable to the corporate sector. “Why will those who are brilliant come into teaching when they have high-paying options elsewhere? Teaching has become a second choice,” Hariharan says. As for cutting corners with infrastructure, he says, “To teach mechanical engineering, you need big, heavy machinery to demonstrate and practice on, such as the lathe machine. You need original softwares, which cost money. Colleges that are barely running on profit due to the empty seats will not have the funds or the inclination to update their infrastructure to suit the needs of students.”

The governing body, however, is keen to bring about systemic changes to improve the quality of technical education. It announced an updated syllabus in 2016, and all colleges were asked to incorporate at least 60 per cent of the changes stipulated. But in the absence of an enforcement mechanism, there can be no real change on the ground. The AICTE has also made it mandatory for engineering college teachers to attend the six-month training programmes conducted by it at various centres across the country.

Students, too, are being encouraged to update their capabilities in step with the changing times. “To inculcate a competitive atmosphere, we have introduced countrywide hackathons,” says Hariharan. “We just concluded our first software hackathon, and the hardware hackathon will follow soon. It will be mandatory for students to do internships in their second and third year, and participate in industry projects, to test their employability early on. Credits will be allotted accordingly.”

Additionally, the AICTE is recommending setting up an innovation cell in every engineering institution for entrepreneurs-in-the-making. Under a tie-up with Carlton University in Canada, 50 women students, in groups of 10 each, will take part in an exchange programme to develop their entrepreneurial skills. The Canadian government has agreed to initially provide funding for the successful start-up ideas that emerge from this mentorship programme. Similar projects are in the pipeline with the Korean government, as well. “The bottomline is, we don’t need engineers in such mass quantities. However, there is still a demand for good engineers, who are a rarity,” says Hariharan.

A warning unheeded

Data from AICTE shows that only 50 per cent of the eight lakh BE/BTech graduates were selected through campus placements last year. This was not wholly unexpected, however. In 2003, a committee headed by former ISRO chairman UR Rao was tasked with reviewing the performance of technical education in the country. The committee suggested a five-year moratorium on seat allotments in states that exceeded the recommended intake of 150 per million population. Fifteen years on, that suggestion has still not been acted on. “A serious situation has arisen in recent years due to the mushrooming of a large number of private technical institutions and polytechnics,” warns the UR Rao Committee report, claiming only 10 per cent of technical institutions were accredited.

The Rao-headed panel stands vindicated today, as more than 50 per cent of seats remained unfilled in 2016-17, according to AICTE data. Headhunters have projected that there will be three-lakh job cuts annually in the next three years. Last year’s figure was pegged at 56,000 from the top seven IT firms — unprecedented in the history of the $160-billion industry. Since then, hiring has also plummeted. Bhagyashree, a recruiter at a leading manufacturing company, rues the quality of staff they hire each year. “Companies mass-hired engineering graduates for a while now. However, the company has to invest heavily in their training. With budgets slashed every other year, it is a matter of time before the company shifts to digital tools to reduce head-count.” Marooned in this mess will be a generation of engineering graduates who were brainwashed into getting a degree that does not skill them for the job market.

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