Higher Technical Education in India: Need for New Initiatives

Higher technical education in India started receiving priority after independence with the creation of five IITs at Kharagpur, Bombay, Kanpur, Madras and Delhi each with foreign collaboration. Then NITs were created in different regions. Today there are 22 IITs and 31 NITs with an annual intake of 10,000 and 18,000, respectively. There are over 20 Technical Institutions of comparable quality in the private sector. In addition, there are a large number of private engineering colleges whose quality has been questioned. The country graduates over a million students per year with a large number of them from these private engineering colleges. There are not enough jobs for these engineering graduates. There is thus a crisis in engineering education calling for an urgent need to control this growth and also retain quality. We discuss some of these issues and offer solutions, which to many may seem harsh. All the development schemes of the Government. starting from ‘Clean India’ to ‘Digital India’ to ‘Start-up India’ depend on good quality S and T manpower. In this task IITs, NITs and private Technical Institutions with a history of quality have key roles to play.