Venkaiah Naidu pitches for improving technical education system

VELLORE: Voicing concern over the condition of technical education in the country, Union Minister M Venkaiah Naidu today said the time has come for upgrading the system both qualitatively and quantitatively as only 15 per cent of engineers were employable.

Referring to a report by the National Association of Software and Service Companies ( NASSCOM) that only 15 per cent of India's engineering students were employable, the Urban Development Minister said, it was a "serious comment" on the state of Indian technical education.

"Time has come to remedy the same, both qualitatively andquantitatively. Given the magnitude of the task of Nation building do we have enough number of quality engineers being trained?" he asked in his address at the 29th Annual Convocation of the private Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) University, here.

"China has comparable population with us. But 34 per centof their total student enrollment is by engineering students as against six per cent in our case. The situation is even bad in case of post-graduation and PhDs. The ratio for China is 39 per cent as against a mere 3.40 per cent in our country," he said.

VIT University Chancellor G Viswanathan said the government should allocate more funds as the gross enrollment ratio was less than 20 per cent despite there being 700 universities and 37,000 colleges in the country with 2.8 crore students.