THE IDEA WAS TO ENGINEER - Kunal Ray

A friend of mine once said that if you don’t look where you are spitting in a place like Bangalore, India’s very own Silicon Valley, there is an exceedingly high probability that you might end up doing so on an Engineer! No offence really meant to many of my good friends, who, I’m certain, are making lives simple for poor souls like us. But the fact remains that engineering in India has become more of a manifestation of the herd mentality that we all seem to suffer from and not a form of education that it really should be.

Sample these words, “Here in the place of that Hijli Detention camp stands this fine monument of India representing India’s urges; India’s future in the making”. Thus stated the Visionary Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru at the first convocation ceremony of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. More than 50 years and 40000 engineering colleges later, those words, those dreams are yet to materialize to their true potential. Barring a few flagship institutions like the IITs and a handful other colleges, the quality of education imparted at the undergraduate level in engineering is extremely poor. Poor infrastructure, outdated syllabi, meager resources, sub – standard faculty, all have an equal role to play in this four year circus which ends with a Bachelors in Technology.

A vast majority of the private colleges which have mushroomed throughout the country (a small place like Allahabad alone has more than 10!) do not even have basic facilities like hostels, round the clock Internet
connectivity or even libraries, with a healthy books to students ratio. The other better institutions are gifted with broken windows, falling fans, smelly bathrooms and the bad food - things which every engineering aspirant eventually learns to live with. There is student vandalism alright, but the maintenance is virtually nonexistent, even though these engineering colleges charge an exorbitant fee.

In most of the institutions, the same syllabi are being taught since the time of their inception. Same dog-eared text books, redundant yellowing notes being passed from one batch to another form the study material, which everyone ultimately learns by heart because guess what, even the faculty is not really bothered about the technological changes happening in the world. Even the questions asked in the current examinations may be found verbatim in previous five years’ papers. In such a situation, the students spend their years like the proverbial frog that does not have any idea of the outside world and before they know it, their time is over and a new clan of tadpoles are already in place to learn “Engineering“ and make fools of themselves.

Copied assignments, lifted projects, specimen papers, hollow presentations and an inadequate grading system, one can go on and on. But what adds to the comedy is the expectation that such helplessly pseudo engineers can actually innovate and propel the country towards greater independence from borrowed technology. Now this idea is certainly not new; in fact its roots lie as far back as the 1950s but what was a
noble dream then has actually turned into an unrealizable reality today.

Pt. Nehru had a very plain and simple idea with which he started his famous drive towards boosting science and technology in the country. Along with his companion Homi Bhabha, he believed that if an item or equipment was imported from abroad, all one got was that particular instrument. But if one built it oneself, an all important lesson in expertise was learnt as well. Now that is undoubtedly a very splendid thought, but even after 50 years, far from reality.

I don’t have to endeavor much to prove my point. Just take anything which comes first into your mind. Right from the made in Taiwan keyboard, to the refrigerator, to your car! The products may have been assembled or even produced in India, but the technology is certainly not Indian. Maintenance, sales, trouble – shooting and the new buzzword consultancy; Yes Sir! We are the best; but innovation, what is that?

If the idea was to innovate, we have failed, if the idea was to create, we have failed, if the idea was to engineer, we have failed. But Outsourcing? Here we win, much to Obama’s ire…outsourcing jobs that are rightfully somebody else’s and boasting of cheap labour. That is what MNC’s thriving in India are all about. Many Engineers graduating in varied fields like Civil, Mechanical etc. flock behind the software companies, thronging placement centres to become IT engineers. The lure of the lucre besots young minds. They renounce four years of painful passionless undergraduate studies to transform into highly paid software engineers and enter the rat race, confused all the way. We are losing out on skills, our Nation still staggers and we are the most preferred “cheap technical manpower” in the world. But the sad thing is, oblivious of the erosion of our innovative engineering capabilities, we are still proud of our intellectual and technological prowess.