Engg syllabus must be upgraded every year: VIT Chancellor

Chennai: Even as the nation gears up to celebrate its Engineers’ Day in commemoration of the birthday of Bharat Ratna Visvesvaya (September 15, 1861), serious doubts sit heavy upon the minds of millions of engineering students across the country — particularly in Tamil Nadu where the downslide in higher education has been more pronounced than elsewhere — regarding their career in engineering and its relevance in the evolution of India as a global leader in manufacturing industry.

The steady fall in campus recruitments and the dip in entry level salaries have been worrying the bright kids in most reputed engineering institutions while those less endowed appear almost resolved to spending the rest of their lives scratching for late night BPO jobs for salaries thinner than that of a government peon.

Visvesvaraya is known as India’s greatest engineer ever and apart from his technical skills merging percept with meticulous planning that yielded gigantic projects for the nation, he was also patriotic to the hilt. His T-square was obsessed with building modern India.  

“But sadly, such visionaries and patriots are in short supply these days. That’s the reason why no major projects have not come up for a long time to keep pace with the massive development taking place globally”, says Chancellor Dr G Viswanathan of Vellore Institute of Technology, while chatting on the significance of the Engineers’ Day. Predictably, the focus of the conversation stayed on the challenges facing the engineering students in the country.

“Any developing country requires engineers to deliver infrastructure and also any economic development of all the sectors. We have 15 lakh engineering seats in India, of which 2.7 lakh are in the colleges in Tamil Nadu. But then, we require only about 1.5 lakh seats”, Viswanathan says touching upon the first sour point — several engineering colleges suffering a huge load of unfilled seats.

“The engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu were depending on other states to get students and since those states too launched their own colleges, there were not enough numbers migrating here. And those who came sought the best colleges with best faculty and infrastructure; this hurt the others who were not so good”, he says.

Turning to the fall in teaching standards, which is the other fatal ailment dogging engineering education in the state, Dr Viswanathan points out that in the affiliating system, the curriculum is decided by the university and the latter sleeps over this very critical area.

“At the VIT, we upgrade the syllabus every year, comparing our syllabus with leading universities in the world and also checking on the emerging needs of the companies. We involve the companies in our board of studies for evolving the new curriculum. This is not done by other colleges because they are not authorised to do so and the universities to which they are affiliated, have not been undertaking this vitally important task. This exercise must be done every year”, he says.

According to Dr Viswanathan, another important element in improving the employability of the engineering graduates is to encourage them towards entrepreneurship while creating a new mechanism to find placements for them in companies abroad.

“We could use the officers in our External Affairs Ministry and also our missions abroad to help in this”, says the VIT founder, summing up his prescription for ensuring that the future of the emerging engineering graduates is not just secure but also sound.