CHENNAI:Sweeping reforms including giving complete autonomy to engineering colleges to facilitate removal of outdated syllabi must be brought to improve the quality of graduate- engineers, said Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE).
“India is the only country having such stringent regulations”, pointed out Sahasrabudhe on Friday, while delivering his address during the inauguration of a global summit of engineering Deans, which discussed the current scenario and future prospects of engineering education.
Former Tripura, Bihar and West Bengal Governor and educationist DY Patil and chairman of RMK group of institutions RS Munirathnam were part of the inauguration function.
On the curriculum, there could be at least one subject in the course which the student would need to self-learn, Sahasrabudhe suggested.
The competition to get an engineering seat had also reduced with as many as eight lakh seats going vacant across the country, he said. “A number of colleges is not able to fill the seats. They don’t have quality faculty as well. There are a few doctorates among professors,” he said, adding that AICTE was conducting regular inspections to weed out such institutes. The number of seats in the current year had reduced by 35,000, he said.
Echoing the opinion of industry recruiters on the unemployability of Indian graduate engineers, he suggested an active co-ordination between industry and colleges to resolve this issue. Most graduate-students don’t even have the maths knowledge of class X students, he remarked.
“Every industry-specific skills can’t be incorporated into the curriculum. But general ones like soft skills are a must,” he said, during a later session in the afternoon.
The curriculum design could be provided by having a member of the industry on the board of Senate of a university. Industry could also help by bringing in veterans to interact with students and teachers as was being done by BITS Pilani, which conducts talks by Nobel Laureates from Honeywell, a petroleum giant, he added.