Tech education quality still below par: Kris Gopalakrishnan

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In a couple of years from now India will have an intake of a million engineers per annum in its engineering colleges, but there appears to be no big hope on the quality of the students that are churned out.

According to Infosys CEO and managing director Kris Gopalakrishnan, companies continue to bear the cost of training young engineers because the educational institutions are not doing that in appropriate fashion during their time on campus.

"We put our trainees through three and a half months of training at considerable cost" Mr Gopalakrishnan said, adding that there was no change in that scenario until now.

He said most leading players in the industry had to put their trainees through such a drill, before they could be confidently deployed on actual projects. Mr Gopalakrishnan said Infosys had a mandatory training period for new entrants to ensure certain rigorous quality standards while all players in the industry may not stick to such norms.

He said, "India has a lot of catching up to do in terms of technology usage", adding that the government ought to support the technology infrastructure creation as well as improving educational standards.

It is learnt that some tech companies have extended their training programmes for fresh recruits to as long as six months because they have more time on hand owing to the drop in number of projects, caused by the economic downturn.

Mr Gopalakrishnan said the Kerala government's move to decentralize its IT infrastructure by creating district-level IT parks was a good idea, stating that it would be good to have such parks in all districts over a period of time, if possible.

He said IT infrastructure at reasonable price would provide a boost to the industry in general and that government support in this area would be helpful for the industry.