Businessman educationist
EducationWorld July 05 | EducationWorld
In a scenario in which Karnataka’s 104 private engineering colleges are under fire for their relatively high tuition fees and for churning out industry-unready graduates who add to the huge and growing number of unemployed, the four-year-old Don Bosco Institute of Technology (DBIT) is lighting a new path for other engineering education institutions. Last month (May) 70 percent of DBIT’s first batch of 143 graduates received job offers from the nation’s top corporates such as Wipro, Infosys, Polaris Software, Oracle, Toyota Kirloskar, Torry Harris while the remainder pressed on for postgrad studies. “Right from the start, our objective was to develop industry-ready engineers. Our curriculum was designed accordingly and includes business communication, supply-chain management, corporate etiquette, life skills, project and application management training. The proof that we have succeeded in attaining this objective is that leading corporates have hired our graduates,” says Byrasandra Bylappa, businessman educationist and chief trustee of Wayanamac Education Trust (WET), which promoted this impressive state-of-the-art engineering college sited in a green 36-acre campus replete with modern classrooms, laboratories, computer rooms and libraries at a project cost of Rs.50 crore in 2001. A former mechanical engineer who worked in the Kirloskar Electric Company in design, production and sales before promoting his own enterprise “Prashanth Cylinders” in 1982, Bylappa has grown Prashanth Cylinders (P) Ltd (annual sales turnover: Rs.60 crore) into India’s premier and the world’s second largest manufacturer of high pressure arc welding equipment which finds application in the automotive and construction industries. Bylappa’s transformation into a missionary of education began when on a business trip to Kolkata in 1990, he met the late Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity. “I experienced a compelling need to do something similar. When I sought Mother’s opinion, she advised me to help people through education. That’s when I resolved to promote a world-class engineering college,” recalls Bylappa. Since then the Wyanamac Education Trust has expanded the ambit of its operations. Currently WET administers four institutions of higher education in Bangalore: DBIT, Don Bosco College of Sciences and Management, Don Bosco Institute of Bio Sciences and Don Bosco Pre University College, and has an aggregate enrollment of over 2,500 students. DBIT, which has 1,058 students instructed by a faculty of 94 including 20 Ph Ds, offers a four-year (eight semester) bachelor of engineering degree and two-year (four semester) Masters in business administration programme of the Visveswaraya Technological University, Belgaum. The average teacher-pupil ratio is 1:15. Fully committed to fulfilling his education mission, Bylappa has drawn up an impressive expansion plan for DBIT. Soon the four-year-old college will introduce postgraduate programmes in mechanical engineering, computer science, initiate foreign language training for final year students, and will set up industry training centres on campus. “Whether in business, industry, education or any other endeavour, I benchmark my institutions with the best in the world. Therefore I have set my sights on getting DBIT ranked among the top 50 engineering institutions worldwide. I won’t spare any effort or investment required,” vows Bylappa. Way…