Time to rethink beyond engineering 🤔

USA produces around 1 lakh Engineers per year for a $ 16 Trillion Economy.

India produces 15 lakhs Engineers for a $ 2 Trillion Economy.

The earlier mass recruiting sector was Manufacturing. It used to recruit from the core branches like Electrical Mechanical, Civil etc. But, Manufacturing is relatively stagnant at 17% of the GDP. So the core branch placements have become very difficult.

The more recent mass recruiter was the IT sector. It grew from scratch to almost 5% of the GDP in a short time. IT Employed millions of engineers.

Now, IT is also  saturating. Only good, skilled IT Engineers are in demand.

If you look at the sectoral composition of Indian economy, most of the sectors 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 of engineers in Health, education, Agriculture is also negligible.

More than 50% of the GDP has no role for Engineers. Still most of Indian youth are becoming Engineers. The  situation is not sustainable .

Demand is low while  supply is high. Over and above this, skill level of an average engineer is poor, almost its non-existent in many cases. If we leave aside the top 100–200 colleges, most fresh engineers have no idea of what they studied. 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 10-15 lakhs. For poor parents, its a huge burden. When their son / daughter is not able to secure a job, they are devastated.

For the nation, you can calculate the loss. Leave around 1 lakh engineers that NASSCOM says are employable. The rest 14 lakhs 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.

Also students should explore other career options than everyone becoming Engineers.

So, share this to your relatives/parents/12th pass students and help them in planning their education appropriately.