Building excellence in engineering education in India

The country has become a permanent member of Washington Accord in the year 2014 and to begin with, it has become mandatory for TIER-I institutions to seek accreditation of programmes, which will facilitate international recognition of qualification and the mobility of students of engineering institutes across the globe. In other words, engineering institutions need to strive for continuous improvement in the various sub-components of the system namely, input, resources-physical, information, human, financial and energy, curriculum and instructional processes, management, output, interaction with world of work and feedback mechanism. India has third largest system of education in place but still faces problems of access, equity and quality. The major challenges before the country include: converting demographic advantage to demographic dividend, increasing Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) at higher and technical education level, providing equal access to technical education in different states & diverse groups, providing competent human resource for manufacturing sector, rural development & transformation and infrastructure development. Technical education system comprises of 8462 institutions offering degree in engineering and technology and 3524 institutions offering diploma in engineering and technology with an intake capacity of 3.4 million students. These institutions are facing severe criticism due to decline in quality. Government of India has taken a number of initiatives in this direction. For example, these initiatives include making National Board of Accreditation an independent organization from the regulatory body AICTE, launch of mission teacher and training, sub-mission on polytechnics under coordinated action for skill development, providing impetus to National Mission on Education through ICT etc. to improve the quality of higher and technical education in the country. Strategies need to be adopted at institute level to improve quality and build excellence such as improving curriculum and instructional processes, linkages with world of work, optimal utilization of resources, creating research culture, formulating staff development policy etc. in the system of technical institutions. The paper attempts to highlight strategies that can help the institutes to improve quality and strive towards excellence.