Education
ENGINEERING EDUCATION IN INDIA
Rangan Banerjee Vinayak P. Muley
Sponsored by
Observer Research Foundation
Department of Energy Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Powai, Mumbai – 400076
December 16, 2008
Engineering Education in India
Executive Summary India has the potential to be a global technology leader. Indian industry is competing globally in software and even in areas such an automobiles, chemicals and engineering equipment. A critical issue for the future success of Indian industry is the growth of engineering education in India. Since independence, the initial focus of government policy was to provide the engineers required for the developing economy. The setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Regional Engineering colleges (and their subsequent conversion to the National Institutes of Technology) were targeted at achieving this. Indian engineers established their reputation for engineering and design skills. Engineering in India is preferred option for bright students at the 10+2 level. This has resulted in a spurt in engineering colleges primarily in the private sector. Despite this, industry leaders complain about the absence of quality engineers for their industry. This is accompanied by significant unemployment rates amongst graduating engineers. There is a dearth of publicly available data on India’s engineering education system. We document the trend in the student intake, number of engineering graduates, post-graduates and Ph.Ds. In order to obtain these we used assumptions of Output / Sanctioned strength ratios and their trends. It is seen that is a regional disparity in engineering degrees with Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka having the highest number of engineering graduates per population. India awarded about 2.3 lakhs engineering degrees, 20000 engineering masters degrees and about 1000 engineering Ph.Ds in 2006. India’s doctorate degrees are less than 1% of graduate
Rangan Banerjee Vinayak P. Muley
Sponsored by
Observer Research Foundation
Department of Energy Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Bombay Powai, Mumbai – 400076
December 16, 2008
Engineering Education in India
Executive Summary India has the potential to be a global technology leader. Indian industry is competing globally in software and even in areas such an automobiles, chemicals and engineering equipment. A critical issue for the future success of Indian industry is the growth of engineering education in India. Since independence, the initial focus of government policy was to provide the engineers required for the developing economy. The setting up of the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Regional Engineering colleges (and their subsequent conversion to the National Institutes of Technology) were targeted at achieving this. Indian engineers established their reputation for engineering and design skills. Engineering in India is preferred option for bright students at the 10+2 level. This has resulted in a spurt in engineering colleges primarily in the private sector. Despite this, industry leaders complain about the absence of quality engineers for their industry. This is accompanied by significant unemployment rates amongst graduating engineers. There is a dearth of publicly available data on India’s engineering education system. We document the trend in the student intake, number of engineering graduates, post-graduates and Ph.Ds. In order to obtain these we used assumptions of Output / Sanctioned strength ratios and their trends. It is seen that is a regional disparity in engineering degrees with Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka having the highest number of engineering graduates per population. India awarded about 2.3 lakhs engineering degrees, 20000 engineering masters degrees and about 1000 engineering Ph.Ds in 2006. India’s doctorate degrees are less than 1% of graduate