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Engineering Education in India
here has been exponential growth in the engineering education sector in India during the past two decades. The number of engineering colleges has grown to more than 3,500 with a capacity to admit almost 1.1 million students annually. This skewed demand and supply situation, where the number of institutions far exceeds the requirement, has resulted in a large number of seats in various colleges remaining vacant.
real concerns
However, the main concern should not be the number of seats for Bachelorlevel programmes going unfilled. Rather, the real challenges that should be bothering the policy planners are the fact that Masters and doctorate-level programmes are not the preferred choice of the students. Further, there are
academics
very few takers for programmes dealing with basic sciences. The problem gets aggravated due to the average or below par quality of technical institutions in the country. The acute shortage of faculty also compounds this dismal scenario. Recent reports indicate that some of the elite technical institutions are facing faculty shortage to the extent of 30 to 40 per cent. A study published in the AIU Journal (January 06-12, 2003) had estimated that the shortage of faculty with doctorate level qualifications is likely to persist for the next 20 years or so. But if we consider the pace of expansion in the engineering education sector during the past decade, the shortfall may not be made up in the next 30 years. The study had also
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Year Fig. 1: Number of graduate engineers in India per million population
December 2011 EduTEch
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