Faculty Crunch - Obstacle to growing engineering services market in India

Faculty Crunch - Obstacle to growing engineering services market in India

As per the recent Nasscom-Booz study India's IT engineering services is set to touch $50 billion by 2020. India is the ultimate destination for offshoring engineering services for diverse industry verticals largely due to lower engineering costs, growing addressable domestic market and presence of service providers with capability of providing high-end engineering services on various products. Indian service providers are now looking to tap growing opportunity in ESO (engineering services outsourcing) space. But one of the biggest obstacle to growth could be faculty crunch at India's prestigious institutions like IIT's and IIM's. Growth of engineering services and availability of quality engineering workforce depends on the engineering education system in India. However the faculty crunch prevails in most of the major Indian institutes. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore does not have even half the teachers it needs; the same situation prevails at the three Schools of Planning and Architecture (SPAs). In fact, all the centrally funded institutes - whether it is the Indian School of Mines (ISM) at Dhanbad or the NITs that are spread across the country - are currently functioning without the necessary number of professors.

The IITs have the largest share of the crunch with an overall deficit of 1284 teachers out of which 222 teachers fall short at IIT- Bombay alone. The situation is similar at IISc, which is pioneer at the science and education front in contemporary technologically important fields, and the SPA, a specialized university, the only one of its kind that provides training in different aspects of human habitat and environment.

Experts believe that the inability to find adequate and qualified professors may seriously hamper India's ability to groom top-notch engineers, scientists and businessmen of the future. Indian government will have to soon take corrective measures to overcome the lack of supply of quality professors to grow India's engineering services market.