A long discussion with the scientists at a top notch technology company just before the weekend triggered a lot of doubts in my mind. The most striking statement that made me think came from a Senior Scientist who happens to be a Professor too. During the discussion , my boss just asked about a tool chain which was too tough to configure manually and hence suggested the need to automate them , for which the guy just replied , “That’s why we have Indians” . I was the only Indian in the room and since I was at the lowest level (in terms of hierarchy and experience) I just had to shut up and listen. It is easy to call that a very chauvinistic statement. But what do I say? Do we really have answers to that? Can I call that guy a racist and say that he’s crazy or did he really reflect upon the truth? Are we(Indian people and companies) innovative enough in all domains or do we restrict ourselves to just being sweatshops to European and US companies?
A vast majority of educated people might go on the defensive and talk about numbers and say that our GDP is growing at 7 to 8% and India producing 5 Lakh engineers annually. This means that we produce the same number of qualified engineers annually as much as the whole of Europe can have at a given point of time. Well, does that mean that qualitatively we have enough engineering capabilities to build our own engineering companies having independent research capabilities? It is always a question that makes me think.
My question is not on who to blame, but where to start? IITs and IISc have a good track record of research and personally I feel that their sphere of influence is limited to less than 3000 people who pass GATE exam and manage to do an M.Tech / M.Sc/PhD program at these reputed institutes. From the information I was able to gather from my friends , some of these M.Tech students go ahead and do their PhD from the leading universities in the world and settle abroad. My question is not how to stop the brain drain that we have in our country, but with the given number of engineers passing out of our country , how can we optimize their education and their knowledge for a better tomorrow? In a sense, I am not looking forward to a radical change in the existing system, but still hope for a change which can contribute a bit to the existing scenario of engineering in our country. How can we improve the B-grade and the C-grade engineering schools in our country?, Although, I hate to use such words while describing places where people like me studied, it cannot be forgotten that such levels do exist and there is a striking contrast between the quality of the faculty, lectures, exercises , challenges and the peers .
Well, as population increases , our government will be forced to start new IITs and IISc campuses all over India to accommodate the growing number of students who take up technology as their subject. From my discussions with people , what I was able to understand was that majority of the IITs which were newly started lack enough qualified faculty. Our government is paying reasonably well for the Lecturers but still there is a true shortage of good lecturers and professors in our top notch engineering colleges. But I probably feel that upgrading existing Central universities and raising the quality of existing institutes by recruiting new staff for the currently vacant positions and contributing more money towards better infrastructure in Government owned colleges is the right way to go as the gap between IITs and the rest of the institutes could be bridged to an extent. This would ensure that we would have a more inclusive way of approaching our higher education system. For example , A 1500 crore grant sanctioned for a new IIT could be utilized by 15 such central universities to scale up their facilities and serve a majority of people rather than adding another 300 to the elite university graduates list. I know that IITs are today a global brand and so on …but the government must not get carried away with that.
The next question is how to improve productivity and research output from our country. How can we become more innovative in creating an external market for Indian Engineered products? Will we Indians ever succeed in the complete cycle of conceptualization, design, implementation, testing, sales and after sales support of high end technology products for a company of our own? Some companies are there in India who can do all these successfully, but, a vast majority of them are happy to just buy technology at a premium price or to just be sweatshops for other companies. I find nothing wrong in that, but for how long will we continue to be like this? When do we people move up the value chain? When will we have more patents from Indian companies and Indian inventors?
The next question that I have in my mind is more basic. How do we produce more practical, productive and innovative engineers from the lesser known colleges?(the vast majority of IIT engineers hardly stay in our country after their bachelors degree). Do you think our engineering degree must be a 4 year system where the 4th year should be completely spent on projects? Anyways it is not possible to learn the complete electrical or mechanical engineering theory even within 6 years so I feel its better to learn by implementing for a year once you have a feel of it. Three years is a good period to learn basic principles from a broader engineering perspective I guess. The next one year could be spent on creating something more meaningful than vomiting equations and definitions on the paper. As I told you before , it is not something new but the emphasis that has to be placed on such a project must be much more than what it is right now. We must ensure that such student projects need to be verified for originality of content and ownership to ensure the quality of the projects done by students of the respective universities.
Why we don’t have enough innovative Engineering Companies? Now looking at the number of Engineering PhDs that graduate of universities in India, I really feel that our higher education system needs to be revamped. Also, our Ministry for HRD must take strict measures to ensure that a PhD student must not spend more than five years in a university on an average. I do agree that for a PhD there might be a possibility that the lab might not have all the facilities to test something and so on..but unless there is an ultimatum and time limit set , we won’t produce results. So in a sense, there must be a certain amount of accountability on the professor to answer why a PhD student was not awarded a degree at the end of 5 years of research. As our country is still developing, we need socially relevant technologies to evolve, which will not come from Multinational companies , but from local innovators who are very few in number. Also as Late C.K Prahlad wrote , the bottom of the pyramid is growing. I would say that , As the bottom of the pyramid grows, as engineers, we must try to use the opportunity to find our own solutions not to rely on technological adaptations of obsolete products from big multinational companies for the developing world but use this opportunity to create tailor made products for our own society based on our own needs and not fall for cheap marketing gimmicks of technology giants.
