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The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019 report by the Ministry of Human Resources stated that the field of engineering is the fourth popular stream with 38.52 lakh students who enrolled in different institutes in the country.
The Indian engineers have started to be devalued with an increase in the number of engineering seats and more engineering colleges being set up every year. The country's BE/BTech degree has further lost its importance in recent years. Aspiring Minds- An employability assessment company released a survey in 2019 that said that 80 per cent of Indian engineers are unemployed for a job in the knowledge economy.
The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019 report by the Ministry of Human Resources stated that the field of engineering is the fourth popular stream with 38.52 lakh students who enrolled in different institutes in the country. New engineering institutes were established all across India when the IT industry was growing. However, these institutes compromised on the curriculum and aimed more at finding linkages with industry along with a poor student-faculty. Except for the IITs , some of the NITs and a few of the private engineering colleges, these institutes could not make the candidates job-ready which further led students to get jobs in Group D. Such jobs did not require more than class 12 certificates.
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From 2017 to 2018, not more than 50 per cent of candidates got jobs from the AICTE-approved colleges . Out of the 7.92 lakh graduates, only 3.52 lakh could get hold of employment through campus placements, data as provided by Ramesh Pokhriyal, HRD Minister in 2019. The data does not include engineering students who secured jobs outside of the campus placements or went for some other option.
The question is why were so many engineering colleges established in the country after all. It is because of the IT boom in 2000-2015 and the need for more IT Knowledge workers in different companies in the world which only increased over the years. Nevertheless, the massive automation in the sector had an untoward impact on the industries. The issue was brought up many times in AICTE wherein it was decided that the market forces should be left to decide on the matter with the best performers.
The industry bodies never came up with a solution and said that AICTE could not estimate the requirements of the industry. This led to the opportunities for the education entrepreneurs who made the best out of the same.
According to media reports, 2017 was marked by an uneven growth in colleges in the field. In 2016-17, AICTE said that around 51 per cent of the undergraduate engineering seats were left vacant. In 2019, hardly 10 lakh of 14.9 lakh seats were filled and states like West Bengal and Odisha have registered less than 50 per cent intake of students.
During the period of 2010-11, around 330 undergraduate colleges out of a total of approximately 450 engineering colleges were set up. Many of these institutions were shut down since 2016. The HRD minister revealed that the AICTE had closed around 130 engineering institutes in the country. In addition to that, it also said that colleges which did not fill more than 30 per cent of their overall seats in the past five years were shut down.
For the first time in 2019, all BE/BTech seats at the UG level were filled at the IITs. To ensure the same for all the other colleges in the country, the ministry of HRD has launched different initiatives including internships, contemporary labs in AI, cloud computing, machine learning, IoT and so on.
Former HRD secretary said that the funding of technical education in India must be increased and the recent decision taken by the government to stop all PG scholarships will only lead to a serious sink in the enrollment.
