India’s most admired non-IIT engineering colleges 2013

Given the extraordinary exclusivity of IITs which admit a mere 2 percent of aspiring engineering students annually, your editors decided to eliminate them from EducationWorld-C fore’s inaugural rankings of India’s most admired engineering colleges. Dilip Thakore reports It’s well-known the prosperity of the developed OECD nations of the first world — and latterly of China — has been built upon the foundation of an industrial base or manufacturing capability. Yet despite the early start in industrial manufacturing given to the nation by pre-independence era entrepreneurs such as J.N.Tata, G.D. Birla, Walchand Hirachand and Lala Shri Ram among others, aspirational post-independence India has not been able to develop sufficient industrial and manufacturing capability, the precondition of attaining developed nation status. According to an Assocham (Associated Chambers of Commerce) press release (May 12), the contribution of the manufacturing sector to India’s GDP is a mere 15.2 percent. Against this the contribution of manufacturing to GDP in developed OECD countries and China averages 20-25 percent and 30 percent respectively. The fault that contemporary India is an industrial also-ran in the rapidly emerging global marketplace is not only of the Nehru-Indira dynasty which jettisoned India’s ancient, tried and tested private enterprise-driven economic development culture and imposed state-driven capitalism, aka public sector enterprises (PSEs) to dominate “the commanding heights of the economy”, but also of the said pre-independence India’s industry pioneers who ill-advisedly endorsed this development model (Bombay Plan, 1944). Lumbered with a cumbersome, high-cost public sector continuously mismanaged by inept, risks-averse bureaucrats, PSE monopolies entrusted with the task of building the nation’s infrastructure and capital goods industries have been a massive failure. However, historic ideology and policy wrong choices apart, it’s also true that a contributory cause of post-independence India’s failure to establish a globally competitive manufacturing base is inferior engineering education. Although it is commonly (and globally) accepted that the country’s seven vintage Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) — a precious Nehruvian legacy — graduate world-class engineers valued by industrial corporations around the world, and especially in the US where many of them have emerged pioneer entrepr-eneurs in their own right, it’s a sobering thought that IIT-Delhi is ranked 212 in the QS World University Rankings 2013. Though several IITs are ranked higher in the authoritative QS and Times Higher Education sectoral league tables of the world’s most respected universities and among Asian universities, even so they have been overtaken by newly-established varsities in China, South Korea, Japan and Singapore (see table). Nevertheless it is well accepted domestically that the seven vintage IITs sited in Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras (Chennai), Roorkee and Guwahati are the crown jewels of Indian technology education. As such they routinely dominate the ranking league tables compiled by a host of indigenous news and media publications including India Today, Outlook, Businessworld, Business India, Economic Times and Business Today among others. The huge reputation which the IITs enjoy for delivering world-class engineering sciences educa-tion, is also testified by the massive annual stampede of hopeful higher secondary school-leavers who prepare intensively…