What I Truly Feel about Engineering Education in India

What I Truly Feel about Engineering Education in India

In my professional career in India, I have worked in multiples of about five years in two different organizations for a total of 23 years and I learned a lot while shifting from academia, including research, to a couple of industries, and then back to academia, for about 10 years.

I am not aware that any of the faculty in the School to which I was affiliated knows that on February 9, 2024 a Boeing aircraft jettisoned a door soon after take-off. OK, it was not a door, but a door panel plug fitted in a space originally designed to have had a door. Even if any one of my colleagues had read about that incident, they did not acknowledge it in water-cooler conversations. That silence, other than water gurgling, was deafening.

What I learned is that four bolts came off the panel because the required “edge distance” had not been provided – the bolts were too close to the edges of the panel. A design/drawing/fabrication flaw, fortunately no fatalities. This is taught to students as the first thing in steel design. No surprise. I will explain in a little while.

It is six months, at least, since there has been a major incidence of failure on the National Highway running just outside the university (Deemed-to-be) campus, only 7 km due west. I immediately knew that such a failure could not have happened but it did. That is, it has to be a major failure, probably a landside inside the embankment without a structural retaining wall – a Retaining Earth (RE) wall. A major disaster.

I suggested that our students be taken there, with appropriate permissions, to learn about the mechanics of such an almost free-standing retaining wall and also think – merely think – about the possible causes. The repair work must have gone on for more than four months, but no initiative from any other quarters to spur a site visit by students. Now it is too late, as the affected lane has been repaired (with an incongruously higher crash barrier). I would speculate, as I know the mechanism, that it is a failure of the drainage system. On the other side, as a precaution, the concessionaire has installed additional drainage pipes, jutting out of the panels, spoiling the aesthetics! 

In the School of Civil Engineering at the university, we are intent on producing diploma holders, who can do what they are told to do or repeat what others have done, and give the students degrees – at the undergraduate and post-graduate (“Graduate” in Americanese) levels.

I will take up the post-graduate level first. There is absolutely zero aptitude for analysis. Indeed, even our faculty may end up asking what analysis is. I am not joking. My experience over the past five or six years has repeated itself numerous times – every post-graduate project was a substitution project – substitute some material for cement and claim enhanced eco-friendliness. Indeed, it was I who, in howsoever loud a voice I could muster, commented on lack of justification for the claim.

Cow dung instead of cement paste type of thing; or bacterial healing of concrete when at best what happens is a precipitate of dubious structural strength fills in the cracks. As far as I know there have been no strength tests of the precipitate itself. The only thing is resistance to attacks by chloride, sulphates and others. There is absolutely no curiosity – Oh, I am doing what has been done earlier, by substitution. No science behind it.

Undergraduate students go into frenzy when they see a question that does not have numbers. Any and all algebraic manipulations are beyond their ken. They have become excellent calculator-punchers. I know that all the first year engineering students will be stunned by the question paper in Engineering Mechanics if it had reached beyond the level of calculator-punching. They know their formula, and know how to calculate. That is all is being tested.  

But, faculty are incarnations of Karnan (of Mahabharat) when it comes to grading CIA papers. There was an instance in a section that in two tests (during the semester), the minimum mark obtained was 56% (28/50)! Read that again – the MINIMUM. That section must have been a select bunch of geniuses!

It is likely that an elective course in Finite Element Analysis will be dropped. I suspect it is the mathematics, not necessarily daunting if taught as a development in mathematics, which led to such automated processes to get the desired results, but if, and only if, the input was correct.  An engineer’s experience in a software is no guarantee that she would spot a major error – recall the Boeing incidence, if it were a design flaw.

There is enough breast-beating about the standard of teaching. Perhaps justifiable. Yet, we should take a look at the system. At one level, you have the so-called edupreneurs, aka the management. Very tough people to satisfy, because they are just accountants who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They think engineering is just punching in and printing out, true practitioners of GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out.

At the immediate lower level you have the heads of schools/departments. They are betrothed to the idea of education as source of profit, per the management. They lose their spirit of the venture the moment they get to be the head.  Rather, that spirit is redirected to elsewhere. I have seen this happen, and publish technical papers.

Just below are the other members of the faculty. My opinion of their technical output is unprintable. They are abiding by the instruction they get, from the management and more incessantly, from the head of the school/department. Set easy questions, award high marks independent of performance, guide researchers through a repetition of prior work and publish technical papers of dubious quality. I am being generous here.

The students are not blameless. A student gave a feedback for me saying that I do not know anything about the subject on which I have climbed many rungs, indeed, many ladders over the past 50 years. I cannot but dismiss it. It neither affected me nor could have affected me personally.

Now, to the apex of this pyramid. There sits the parent(s). They are looking at the immediate RoI of the education their wards are getting.

So, if you wish to get your institute a rung up the ladder, as the edupreneur you have to sacrifice profit for a brief time and focus on students’ education and not merely their placement. Educate the parents about what you are doing.

“Oh, no, we can’t do that,”  I hear the edupreneurs’ chorus.

Then, sit at the top of the garbage heap.

Raghuram Ekambaram