Professional
Education for the Progressive Development of the Nation
Best wishes to all the young budding
engineers, those are attempting the GATE -2012 examination scheduled on
12/02/2012. We wish each one of you to excel in this examination. As you are
aware, this year onwards the recruitment in the major public sector undertaking
(PSU) is based on the GATE score.
The private unaided institutes have
grown leaps and bounds since the privatisation of professional education in the
country, early 1980. Many eyebrows were raised during the privatisation of
professional education, expressing serious doubts, questions regarding the
quality of education and its sustainability. Looking back and analysing the
track record of these institutes, it is observed that the output from majority
of these institutes have provided tremendous impetus to the growth of the
nation, especially in IT and IT enabled sector. The competent engineers from
these institutes have excelled in all walks of life.
The population of the country is
increasing; creation of employability to ever increasing population is most
demanding one. This demand can be met with proper planning and thinking well
ahead of the time. The need of the hour is to bring more and more population
under professional education to meet the demand for future work force requirement.
The existing numbers of institutes, universities are not just sufficient to
meet the futuristic demands; we require increasing these numbers to manifold in
coming years. However, the basic question arises again about the quality of
output from these institutes. This can be achieved strategically implementing
the continuous improvement process in each component of the institute, like
management, faculty and student. This can be augmented further through the
consistent monitoring and auditing of these institutes based on the learning
outcomes, faculty development initiatives, knowledge imparting methodology
adopted, effective and efficient policies for creation of academic environment
for imparting requisite skills
Keeping this in view, it is imperative
to maintain and sustain quality of professional education for the progressive
development of the nation. The emphasis shall be on planning and executing the
setting of quality oriented technical institutions at every nook and corner of
the country, with the involvement of private investment to maximum extent
throughout the geographical arena, public and private partnership (PPP) mode
investment in remote and under developed areas. Initially the results may not
yield on the expected level, but necessarily it is an investment, which paves
way for the sustainable development for posterity.
The concern about the quality of
engineers graduating from these institutes can be addressed, opting for the
certification of the engineers (i.e., Qualified Engineer), by conducting the
national level certifying exam to ascertain the quality of engineers. The GATE
exam can be treated as a certifying examination at National level. The
engineering graduates are asked to clear the GATE exam with a 60 percentile to
be certified as a qualified engineer to get employment in all engineering
stream. The graduates are given three attempts to achieve this, within three
years after successfully completing the third year engineering examination.
