Is India overproducing Engineers?
Ravinder Bhan
Management Consultant | 35 Yrs Corporate | Across 6 countries | CEO Turned Farmer | Curating Memorable Experiences| Building Your Life Style Assets | Pro bono advisor to the needy employees and entrepreneurs|
The mere numbers
???US produces around 100k engineers per year for a $ 16 Trillion economy. India produces 1.5million engineers for a $ 2 Trillion economy. If there are so many engineers, there must be enough demand to pull them in. But it is not there.
The earlier mass recruiting sector was manufacturing. It used to recruit from the core branches like civil, electrical and mechanical. But, manufacturing is stagnant at just 17% of the GDP. So the core branch placements have become difficult.
Where will they go
The new mass recruiter is the IT sector. It grew from scratch to almost 5% of the GDP in 25 years. Employed millions of engineers. Now, IT is also saturating.
If you look at the sectoral composition of Indian economy, most of the sector do not need engineers. Tourism is 10% of the GDP, does not require engineers. Financial sector, trade, hotels and restaurants do not require engineers. Requirement in health, education, agriculture is almost negligible.
More than 50% of the GDP has no role for engineers. Still most of us are becoming engineers. The current situation is not sustainable.
The Supply Demand Gap
So the demand is less while the supply is high. Over and above this, skill level of an average engineer is poor. I say its non-existent. Leave the top 100–200 colleges. And you will find that a fresh engineer has no idea of what s/he has studies. Ask a fresh mechanical engineer, can s/he design a simple frame?
Today the situation is that most engineers are working in a field that has no connection to what they have studied in the college. This is a waste of resources.
Engineering degree does not come cheap. It costs about 10 lakhs (apprx $15k). For poor parents, its a huge burden. When their son is not able to secure a job, they are devastated.
Where are we headed
For the nation, you can calculate the loss. Leave around 100k engineers that NASSCOM says are employable. The rest 1.4 million have each wasted 10 lakhs of fees. That totals to around $ 20 Billion. Almost equal to the Government’s spending on healthcare. Over this, there is loss of human capital.
We need to replan the whole engineering education system. Cut down on the number of colleges and improve the quality in the rest
NOTE
The above is not written by me, but received as a forward from one of my WhatsApp contacts, who doesnt know the source. So, nor do I. But I found it quite logical to share and seek your views.
Engineer, Technical and Fashion Writer/Editor/Publisher
6 年Then what about the ones who have already become engineers? Isn't teaching them how to have their own start ups in every field of engineering or medicine or law or higher level of qualifications would serve some help to a nation crippled with population boom for decades. Maybe India has problems which needs to be dealt differently with parameters which has not been set before. India has primarily failed to control population explosion. How come an efficiently working and earning member/ provider in a family can give the same quality of life to every other member if the family is unfailingly expanding and it's not even considered a problem among them.
Manager - Hardline Inspections at Intertek
6 年The demand and supply could be one of the justification for overproduction but the most important fact is skill . If 50 % of our GDP does not need an engineer then we have to remanr the degree and add the skills what the 50 % of GDP needs . Communication and skills of socializing are something which should be available to any fresher like we have oxygen available in the atmosphere . If we can improve only on these 2 parameters a lot of our so called freshers would be come much more employae than what they are today .
DIRECTOR
7 年over producing incompetent engineers...
Senior Cloud Operations Engineer at Nice Actimize
7 年yes
Industrial PHD Student at ?rebro University
7 年yes it's true we have to change the Education system in INDIA