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'In India, articulation is mistaken for accomplishment'

April 24, 2009

Despite the fact that India's stature has grown globally, there is criticism that only 30 per cent engineers are employable in India. Do you agree?

You know this industry -- my own IT industry -- on an average recruits about 200,000 to 250,000 engineers a year. And we produce about 400,000 or so.

In that sense possibly about 50 per cent engineers are absorbed, and hopefully other sectors employ the rest of them. It is difficult for me to believe that 70 per cent of the engineering graduates are unemployed. However, this year it could be different because the recruitment levels of all companies have gone down.

What do you think could be done to make higher education in India better?

To enhance the quality of our higher education, we can do five things:

One, enhance the autonomy of our higher education system;

Second, encourage them to collaborate with world-class institutions outside India, within India too, but most of them are outside India... ;

Third, bring in a sense of meritocracy in the selection of students and the appointment and promotion of faculty;

Fourth, create incentives for our faculty members to do more world-class research; and

Fifth, remove any licensing in the education system. We gave up most of industrial licensing in 1991. It is silly that we continue licensing of our educational institutions.

Image: (Left to right) Sudha Murthy, N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani, a journalist at Bombay magazine before their wedding, at a picnic near Bangalore in the early 1980s. | Photograph, courtesy: Infosys technologies

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