A couple of days back, two reporters from ITV’s  ‘India News’ Hindi channel came to our college. They were looking to interview a few faculty members and students regarding reasons for so many engineering college seats going vacant every year.

This year, almost 2 lakh seats were available under the EAMCET Convener’s quota and about 45,000 seats under the management quota. About 9000 seats under the former quota were still vacant even after the second phase of counseling was closed, close to 6000 of which were in Engineering streams and 3000 in pharmacy. Even under the management quota (45,000 seats), only the top 10 colleges (out of a total 645 colleges) could manage to fill up their seats.

Though every study on skilled manpower requirement concludes that our engineering colleges need to jack up their intake to meet the demand for the next decade, we still find the perplexing reality of most colleges offering engineering courses having quite a few seats lying vacant.

It is not that this reality has suddenly been thrust on us. It was slowly seeping in all along and the signs were there for the past few years.For example, Tamil Nadu found that the demand for traditional engineering subjects like Mechanical, Civil, Electrical etc we steadily going up as compared to the hot-favourites like Electronics, IT and Computers. This is more or less the same in every state – more so Andhra Pradesh.

If observed, courses like IT, Electronics and Computers are technology based as compared to the traditional ones like Civil, Mechanical and Electrical. Science and Engineering are two wheels on which technological progress moves forward. Engineering needs to latch on to put to practice and give a form to advances made by science. One reason why Engineering became such a huge hit with students of the past couple of decades was that it introduced courses just in time to capitalise the boom in IT and computers sectors. This craze was also responsible for the massive surge in engineering colleges and seats as well. These courses thrived because they were introduced just in time to capitalize a boom in a science that required a practical manifestation.

Today, science had made rapid strides in new frontiers like Superconductivity, Nano-materials, Nuclear Energy, Space and Astro sciences, Molecular modeling, Genetics, Micro-biology, Drugs designing  etc. And yet, where are the engineering course to match these strides? How many engineering colleges in India offer courses on any of these fields?

Though there are several other reasons, I would not like to go into them at this juncture. At the end of the day, students would only like to take up something that can give them a good living in terms of job prospects and visibility. People who plan engineering course would therefore need to do a serious re-think on the courses they offer. Are they attempting to merely flog a dead horse? Or should they hitch their wagon to a rising star?

I think it is best to stop here and let people ponder on this cryptic ending.