Engineers Day: Fear stalks engineering students

Chennai: Maheswaran Rathinapandian is preparing for the ‘Engineers Day’ celebrations happening on Thursday at his engineering college in Chennai. The first year ECE student says while he is excited about the Day, there has also been “some real anguish” over reports he recently picked on the Net on how thousands of engineering graduates remained jobless after spending big money on fees and working hard through the four-year course.

The 17-year-old lad from Mogappair is only one among the thousands of students in the 550-plus engineering students in Tamil Nadu facing a bleak future as the unemployment rate in the professional graduates has been alarmingly on the rise. “The situation is not as bad for the arts and science graduates when you take into consideration that they spend less money and time getting their degrees and also have wider job options”, points out ‘Padam’ Narayanan, noted campaigner for educational reforms in Chennai.

“Most engineering colleges these days are producing unemployable and substandard graduates. I don’t blame the colleges and the schools; the real blame lies with the system—both school and college education system—which doles out certificates but not skills”, Mr Narayanan says.

“When I say skills, I am not just talking about engineering skills but even life skills. I have seen graduates who cannot fill up simple application forms. This is pathetic”, says the campaigner.

It could be impossible to find anyone across the socio-educational platform in Tamil Nadu contesting Mr Narayanan’s strong and scary statement. “Thousands of unemployable graduates are pouring out of these engineering colleges every year. It is so worrisome just to consider the building up construction among the youth at not being able to get suitable jobs and build careers”, says Prince Gajendra Babu, well-known educationist.

The “total lack of commitment” on the part of the rulers and education administrators to upgrade syllabus for several years, according to Mr Babu, is the prime reason for this dismal scenario in the state education system. “The plus-two syllabus has not been revised for over 12 years. This is a crime on the part of the education administrators”, he says.

Speaking of engineering education, he points out that parents struggle hard to get their wards into one of the top ten institutions in the hope they would secure campus placements. “But now with the campus recruitments drying up, opportunities are getting rarer. Frustration is building up”, says Mr Babu, while arguing that the colleges themselves are to be mostly blamed for this situation.

“We have seen that several of these colleges do not really allow the students to learn but let them read and write down from the notes prepared by their lecturers, which themselves are pretty much outdated as the syllabus is not revised for years and there is no concern for upgrading to the fast-changing requirements of the industry”, says Mr Babu, who is also the general secretary of the state platform for common school system.

‘Colleges are only tutorials’

The most dramatic solution dished out in recent time to salvage the pitiable engineering education in Tamil Nadu came from none other than Professor M Anandakrishnan, former chairman, IIT-Kanpur just the other day. Speaking to reporters at the 15th International Conference on Tamil Computing organised by Gandhigram rural institute (Deemed University) a few days back, he said nearly 600 engineering colleges are functioning in the state and most of them “are not teaching engineering to students”.

These colleges are only tutorials trying to help students with notes to pass examinations, said the noted professor while apportioning the blame to Anna University as well as it was not taking steps to improve the quality of engineering education and teaching in the colleges affiliated to it.

Shockingly, Prof Anadakrishnan says that while the HRD Ministry has mandated the various IITs to mentor the state engineering colleges in their regions, none of the colleges in TN seek the help of the IIT-Madras to improve syllabus, teaching quality and other infrastructure.

Another bouncer from the professor: When he was the Anna university vice-chancellor, he had done an assessment of the employability of the engineering students and pleaded with the then chief minister M. Karunanidhi not to give permission to open more than 90 colleges. “But that did not happen”, he recalled, adding that while there were only 73 engineering colleges during 1992-93, the number almost touched 600 now. Only some five lakh graduates out of the 16 lakh passing out each year managed to get jobs, he said, justifying his demand for closing down 50 per cent of the engineering colleges in TN.