The Engineer tribe in India celebrates ‘Engineers day’ on September 15 every year from the last 52 years as an occasion to acknowledge the role that engineer’s play in terms of curating technology and advancing it further to make the job of mankind easier than earlier.
Over the years, Engineering has become one of the most common professional courses pursued by the students in the country. In a survey recorded across India in 2019, around 880 thousand students had enrolled for computer science discipline followed by over 782 thousand students registering for mechanical engineering. The other streams of engineering, in the order of preferences is Electronics with more than 631 thousand occupied seats, Civil with over 536 thousand seats and Electrical engineering with 394 thousand seats.
Considering the rise of the IT sector, most of the engineering aspirations deck up their first preference to enrol for Computer Science stream. With respect to the educational system presently followed, the question arises is about the adequacy of the engineering courses and whether they can gear up the professional skills to build a skilled engineer.
Status of the Emerging Engineers in the country
And, even when Engineering is one of the top choices of students, the question then shifts to the skills of the emerging engineers. Is the hype around this profession acting as a misnomer to project the skill set of the emerging engineers? As the aspiring students pursue the course, their mindset should be to grow as developing professionals who can be efficient in their own skill-set but also contribute to the society with respect to simplifying the appearing complex technological attributes and build inventions that impact the lives of the people largely.
However, how skilled are the engineers?
According to a 2019 survey presented on statista, 90 % of the Indian Engineers lack the key skills required for professional world. The same has been affecting on their employment convenience.
Featuring Coding skills and Employability of Indian IT engineering graduates (2019), engineering graduates are compared from India, China, U.S.
The survey has revealed that Indian engineering graduates have only 9.9 per cent of them with the ability to write correct codes or with few errors, around 52.5 per cent of them are unable to write correct codes and 37.7 per cent of graduates lack the ability to write correct compilable code. When comparing the statistics with China, India performs better.
However, engineering graduates from U.S. have been nearly 25% more efficient than the Indian graduates.
This directly digs at the framework of learning provided to the engineering students and the skills they enrich via their learning journey of 4-6 years. It is extremely important to have a practical structure in the learning strategy to cover up for the loosing skills. As, India celebrates the 52 nd ‘National Engineers Day’, it is time their education moulds them into better professionals and their professionalism thrives them to be a little more considerate towards the society.
In various parts of the world, the day is celebrated on different dates, like December 22 for Russia, July 1 for Mexico and June 15 for Italy. In India, September 15, is chosen based on a significant memory.
Why September 15 is celebrated as “Engineers Day” in India?
September 15 marks the birth anniversary of Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who was born in 1861 in a village called Muddenahalli in Karnataka. Visvesvaraya, who was awarded Bharat Ratna, had studied Bachelor of Arts from the University of Madras and then further pursued civil engineering in Pune. In various years of his work, he is particularly recognized for installing an irrigation system with water floodgates at the Khadakvasla Reservoir in Pune for which he was patented. It not only boosted the irrigation facilities but also helped to save lives of the people from flood. According to the Institution of Engineers India (IEI), he was known as “precursor of economic planning in India.”
He served as the Diwan of Mysore in 1915 and was awarded Bharat Ratna in 1955 and became a member of London Institute of Civil Engineers and was awarded a fellowship by Indian Institute of Science (IISC) Bangalore.
To remember his eminent contributions to the nation and to the field of engineering, his birthday is celebrated as ‘National Engineers Day’.
