Engineering and Technical education available in India is available for the asking, but what disturbs everyone today is the quality of engineering education in many colleges across the country that was preparing only mediocre professionals at a time when the country was making rapid strides in industrial output.
The Hindu Education Plus is organising a day-long symposium on January 10 in association with Vignan University at Vadlamudi in Guntur district of Andhra Pradesh to throw light on the shortfalls and the way forward inviting the country's leading technical education experts, who had been instrumental in shaping the curricula. Large number of institutions in the country are not yet following the norms agreed to in the Washington, Dublin and Bologna accords and though we produce a million engineers a year, 85 per cent are estimated not to be possessing the relevant skills.
The Education Plus and Vignan University have invited the former All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) Chairman R. Natarajan, former Andhra Pradesh Department of Technical Education Commissioner K. Lakshminarayana, former JNTU Hyderabad Vice-Chancellor D.N. Reddy, and IIT Madras Department of Mechanical Engineering professor N. Siva Prasad to deliver invited talks to principals of engineering colleges in the central coastal Andhra Pradesh. No registration fee will be charged for the principals or other educators wishing to attend the symposium and could register themselves with P. Krishna Prasad: lakrishna@gmail.com; or R.S. Chandu over mobile No. 9701489130.
The symposium would be organised on the Vignan University campus approachable from Guntur or Tenali. World Bank aided project for improving the quality in engineering education concluded in 2009 and the AICTE has been raiding institutions after a review of complaints by parents and students and a scrutiny of documents submitted by the colleges to the apex technical education regulator. “At least 500 technical education colleges have already been raided in the last few months across India,” disclosed an official.
The surprise checks are conducted by two educational experts and an architect. They verify several credentials such as land transfer and ownership, building plans, infrastructure, quality of education and faculty among other things. Apart from the infrastructure, quality of faculty, ability of institutions to impart employability skills to the students, internationalisation of curriculum response to social, environmental and economic changes would be some of the points of discussion.