K Srinivasan
WHEN Kapil Dev and Virendra Sehwag burst onto the global cricket scene, both of these superstars couldn’t speak enough English to save their lives. It wasn’t part of the curriculum. They were pursuing cricket and they were extraordinarily good and gifted in the sport. Both, though, were smart enough to realise that if they had to milk their success then communication was critical and knowing English was the key. Both mastered the language and went on to become legends of the game. Imagine if they had been knucklehead and decided that they like to be natives and do the business of communication through an interpreter! India’s mass of engineering graduates should be told and retold the Kapil DevSehwag story time and time and time again. How alarming the situation can be assessed from a new survey by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds. The survey outlined that only 4.77 per cent of candidates can write the correct logic for a programme – a basic requirement for any programming job.
Staggering findings
Some of their findings were staggering:
Over 36,000 engineering students (from over 500 colleges) were tested on Automata. This program is an assessment (machine learning-based) of the software development skills of individuals. Twothirds of those who took the test failed.
Only 1.4 per cent can write correct code.
Sixty per cent of candidates cannot even write code that compiles.
According to the IndiaTimes: “The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) wants to close down about 800 engineering colleges across India. There are no takers for their seats, and admissions are plunging in these institutions every year. Nearly 150 colleges are closed down voluntarily every year due to stricter AICTE rules. According to a rule of the council, colleges that lack proper infrastructure and report less than 30 per cent of admissions for five consecutive years will have to be shut down. AICTE has approved the progressive closure of more than 410 colleges across India, from 2014-15 to 2017-18.” Going back in time some years back, a McKinsey in a report bluntly said just a quarter of the Indian engineering graduates were employable. Now remove the IITs from the equation and what you have is a mass of graduates who have nowhere to go.
Spoken English skills
In 2015, Aspiring Minds did a survey, ‘the National Spoken English Skills of Engineers Report’ that stated that “poor English-speaking skills are limiting the employment and earning prospects of India’s engineering graduates.” What the report outlined was that of the roughly 6 lakh engineering graduates the country produced each year, many could write and read English because of rote learning – a survey of 30,000 engineering students across 500 institutions – found that only 2.9 per cent could speak the English language to have the aptitude for high-quality software jobs. Further, close to 70 per cent of them lacked the quality of spoken English necessary to compete for a job in the IT market economy. Pronunciation was the major issue followed by key elements of grammar and sentence construction.
As the Economic Times highlighted: “In 2003, the government formed a committee to find out how technical education was doing in the country. The UR Rao Committee flagged a future glut of graduates. It found technical education was expanding rapidly which could not be sustained in the long run as there wasn’t as much demand for as supply of engineering graduates. Fifteen years later, the committee stands vindicated.’’
Doctors’ story
Engineering is just one side of the story; it is the same concerning medicine. India is producing lakhs of doctors, more than half of whom need a huge amount of skill upgradation to operate at basic levels. Both in engineering and medicine, many of these unemployable graduates end up getting comfortable sinecure in Government institutions and civic corporations. One of the reasons why most corporations in India are teaming with corruption is inefficiency and a lack of imagination is because they end up with all the unemployable.
This is perhaps the most critical issue that stares the Indian Government in the face; not a minute can be lost to try and find a solution.
