Last year, a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds created a stir by claiming that 95 per cent of engineers in the country were not fit for software development jobs. IT veteran TV Mohandas Pai has termed the study "total rubbish". Pai, the Chairman of Manipal Global Education, has been a CFO and a board member at Infosys. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw—founder, chairperson and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon—too disagreed with the findings.
Now an industry veteran's observations have echoed the findings of the study. CP Gurnani, CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra, has said that 94% of engineering graduated were not fit for hiring. "The top 10 IT companies take only 6% of the engineering graduates. What happens to the remaining 94%?" he said in an interview to TOI. Due to to the widening skill gap, now industry has to retrain even those who get hired. "If you come to Tech Mahindra, I have created a five-acre tech & learning centre. Other top companies have also created similar facilities to skill employees. For learnability, skill development and being ready for the market, the onus is now shifting onto the industry," he said.
Commenting on the poor quality of engineering graduates, Gurnanai said, "Let me give you an example a cityDelhi. A student scoring 60% marks cannot pursue BA-English today, but can definitely go in for engineering. My point is simple — are we not creating people for unemployment? The Indian IT industry wants skills. For example, Nasscom says 6 million people are required in cybersecurity by 2022. But we have a skills shortage. The point is if I am looking for a robotics person and instead I get a mainframe person, then it creates a skill gap. This comes as a big challenge."
The Aspiring Minds study claimed that only 4.77 per cent candidates could write the correct logic for a programme—a minimum requirement for any programming job. More than 36,000 engineering students form IT-related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata—a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills—and more than 60% could not even write code that compiles. Only 1.4 per cent could write functionally correct and efficient code, it said.
It said employability for roles such as mechanical design engineer and civil engineer stood at a meagre 5.55 per cent and 6.48 per cent respectively. The lowest employability percentage was for the chemical design engineer role at 1.64 per cent. Employability in the domain-specific roles was the highest for electronics engineers at 7.07 per cent.
A McKinsey report had flagged the issue more than a decade ago when it said just a quarter of engineers in India were actually employable.
India's problem of substandard engineering education is now widely known. Except IITs and other prestigious technology institutes, most engineering colleges are unable to provide education to engineering student that would get them suitable jobs. At the root of the problem is mushrooming of low-quality engineering colleges over the years. As students such colleges fail to get suitable jobs, they face decline in enrolment. Now a large number of these colleges are being closed down.
There will be around 80,000 less seats in engineering this year in the country. This will lead to around 3.1 lakh seats less in four years. According to the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), nearly 200 'substandard' engineering colleges have applied for closure. Since 2016, the number of engineering seats has been on the decline. According to AICTE, it is around 75,000 annually. In 2016-17, total intake capacity at undergraduate level was 15,71,220, of which total enrolment was 7,87,127, which is just around 50.1 per cent. In 2015-16, total intake was 16,47,155, of which enrolment was 8,60,357, which was 52.2 per cent
AICTE wants to close down about 800 engineering colleges across India. There are no takers for their seats, and admissions are plunging in these colleges every year. Nearly 150 colleges are closed down voluntarily every year due to stricter AICTE rules. According to a rule of the council, colleges that lack proper infrastructure and report less than 30% admissions for five consecutive years will have to be shut down. AICTE has approved the progressive closure of more than 410 colleges across India, 2014-15 to 2017-18.