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.