India’s Best Private Engineering Colleges 2016-17

With the monotonously top-ranked IITs and NITs admitting a minuscule percentage of the estimated 1.3 million school-leavers aspiring for engineering education, and other government engineering colleges in a shambles, league tables of the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges serve a very useful public purpose, here are India’s Best Private Engineering Colleges 2016-17: Summiya Yasmeen  Engineering education in India is in deep crisis. An overwhelming majority of the 1.5 million graduates certified annually by the country’s 3,470 engineering colleges — the largest yearly cohort of engineering graduates produced by any nation worldwide — are unemployable. According to the Aspiring Minds National Employability Report 2016 released in early January, 80 percent of the country’s engineering graduates are inadequately skilled for industry. An earlier 2011 report of NASSCOM (National Association of Software & Services Companies) estimated the unemployability of engineering graduates at 83 percent. It ascribed the poor employability of India’s engineering graduates to inadequate knowledge of English (the medium of instruction) and communication skills, inadequate domain knowledge, and deficient technical skills. The general consensus among informed academics is that the quality and unemployability crises in Indian engineering education have been precipitated and accentuated by indiscriminate licencing of engineering colleges by the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex regulatory body for technical education. Over the past decade, the number of engineering colleges in the country has almost tripled from 1,511 in 2006-07 to 3,384 in 2013-14. The fallout of the wild mushroom growth of engineering colleges led by the private sector is excess capacity. In the academic year 2015-16, AICTE estimates that 50 percent of the total seats available (1.6 million) in engineering colleges were vacant countrywide, driving a large number of them to the edge of bankruptcy. Against this backdrop of continuous decline in quality, in 2013 and 2014 EducationWorld published its first pan-India ranking of engineering colleges other than the seven pioneer Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which by common consensus are leagues ahead of other engineering colleges and monotonously top all media rankings. Given that barely 2 percent of the 1.3 million school-leavers who write the IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination) annually, are admitted into these elite institutes, your editors have ab initio felt that the public interest would be better served by eliminating the IITs from our rankings and comparing the remainder inter se. Taking this reasoning a step further, this year we have eliminated all government-promoted colleges including the 30 Central government-funded National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and highly subsidised state government engineering colleges. Like the IITs, the 30 NITs admit a mere 16,000 students countrywide who write IIT-JEE annually, while the majority of state government engineering colleges offer pathetic education. Moreover, with almost 80 percent of the 3,470 engineering colleges promoted and managed by private edupreneurs, it makes good sense to evaluate the relative merits of the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges to enable parents and students countrywide to choose from the best among them. “The IITs and NITs are supported by massive…