Sunday, Apr 25, 2010
Salem: “Engineering education for the next generation should direct students to master the basics of the scientific method in an integrated way,” said B. K. Chandrashekar, former Education Minister of Karnataka, here on Saturday.

Delivering the graduation day address at the Sona College of Technology, Mr. Chandrashekar said that it required a unifying scheme to include the basics of measurements, visualisation, computation and theoretical analysis in the engineering courseware. “Also the increasing interest in interdisciplinary programmes could be beneficially accommodated in the engineering curriculum,” he said. Engineering, he said, mainly focused on the analysis of processes and designing of systems, components and devices that could be used to improve the working of existing processes or invent new artefacts. “Most engineering programmes of education concentrate on creating engineers with narrow specilisation without focusing on research training. The usual way of engineering education and research follows a segregation pattern in which experiments, theoretical analysis and computational techniques are conducted as separate and segregated methods of research and education,” he said.

The average research funding per faculty per year when compared on a purchasing power parity basis seemed reasonable for the Indian institutions. The IIT Bombay's average research funding of Rs.13 lakh per faculty per year and IISc, Bangalore's Rs. 23.7 lakh per faculty per year (including funding for Science) was less when compared with rich American institutions such as MIT, but not bad at all in the Indian context.

“Such a situation was not limited to engineering education. The rest of our *. No wonder none of the Indian universities including IITs and IIMs figure in the list of world's best universities. Only 4 institutions from India figure in the top 500 – compared to 57 in China and 21 from a small country like Israel,” he pointed out.

The worrying scenario might be due to inadequate infrastructure provided by the colleges, grossly inadequate research activity, faculty who lacked excitement and enterprise in teaching and as important as any the shortcoming of students. Often students from rural background had problems with English, which affected their comprehension of the subject being taught. Chairman C Valliappa, Secretary A Dhirajlal and Principal P Govindarajan participated.