Tech Graduates In India Have Zero Hands-on Experience

For the past seven years, Dr Vinay Viswa­nathan has been plugged into India’s engineering education system trying to fill a gap in hands-on learning through his firm JED-I Technologies. It’s far from a promising situation, reckons the co-inventor of the Simputer—the hand-held, multilingual computer which preceded India’s telecom boom and which, even after 15 years, still remains one of the few examples of a novel product that came out of Indian academia. Vinay, a former computer science professsor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), tells Ajay Sukumaran that one of the main problems is that students are typically burnt out by the time they reach an engineering course. Edited excerpts:

You set up your firm JED-I (Joy of Engineering, Design and Innovation) to address a specific gap. Can you take us through that?

Around 2010-11, we (Vinay and co-founder Swami Manohar) had already spent around 10 years as entrepreneurs (both in Strand Life sciences and PicoPeta). During the process of hiring we had interviewed a lot of people, which in any case, we used to do at IISc as well. What was clear was the quality of engineers in the country was somewhat poor and we were wondering whether we can address that gap. There are about 10 lakh engineering seats available in the country and of that I think about 6-7 lakh graduate. Some seats remain empty and maybe a fourth of them probably don’t make it through. The question is—what are we doing with these 6 lakh people? In a typical good year, the IT industry absorbs around 2 lakh people and the core engineering industry, they pick about 50,000 to 75,000 freshers. This means that about 2.75 lakh, or let’s say generously 3 lakh, get placed in a good year—in a bad year, these numbers come down drastically—which still leaves around 3 to 3.5 lakh outside the employment net. That’s one problem.

The second problem is how many, even among those who get employed, are competent engineers, whatever competency means. In 2012, we undertook a survey to understand this. We went to about 8-9 local colleges and asked basic 20 computer science questions. We also went to one of the IITs to be able to compare the difference. We were surprised that the local kids were not able to answer even the simplest of questions despite being in some of the better colleges in Bangalore.