With almost 80 percent of the 3,470 engineering institutions promoted and managed by private entrepreneurs, it makes good sense to evaluate and rank the India’s best private engineering institutes 2017-18 to enable parents and students to choose the most suitable from among them – Summiya Yasmeen Although India’s 3,470 engineering colleges certify more graduates than any other country worldwide, the future isn’t bright for the 1.5 million students who will graduate next month (June). Eager campus recruiters offering six-digit salaries are now folklore and history. The great majority of engineering graduates are likely to accept low-end jobs incommensurate with their formal qualifications, and a substantial number is likely to augment the pool of India’s 40 million educated unemployed. According to several surveys and studies (Nasscom-McKinsey 2005, Aspiring Minds 2016), over 75 percent of the country’s engineering graduates are unemployable in Indian and foreign multinationals. In particular, the National Employability Report 2015-16 of the Delhi-based Aspiring Minds Assessment Pvt. Ltd — an employability evaluation and certification company — indicates that 80 percent of engineers churned out by the country’s engineering and technology institutions every year are unemployable in IT companies. It’s now generally accepted that the prime cause of this snowballing unemployability crisis and huge variation in quality and standards of engineering education countrywide, was indiscriminate licencing of engineering colleges by the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) during the past decade. Their number countrywide has almost tripled from 1,511 in 2006-07 to 3,470 in 2016-17. The fallout of the mushroom growth of engineering institutes — most of them privately promoted — is that in the academic year 2015-16, almost 50 percent of the total seats available (1.6 million) in engineering colleges across the country were vacant. With engineering education in India in deep crisis, in 2013 EducationWorld took the lead to publish pan-India rankings of the country’s most respected engineering colleges excluding the Central government-promoted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which are leagues ahead of other engineering colleges and monotonously top all media rankings. Given that a mere 1 percent of the 1.5 million school-leavers who write the IIT-JEE (joint entrance examination) annually, are admitted into these elite institutes, your editors ab initio felt the public interest would be better served by eliminating the IITs from our rankings, and ranking the remainder inter se. In 2016, we took this logic a step further and eliminated all government-promoted colleges including the Central government-funded National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and highly subsidised state government engineering colleges from our annual rankings exercise. Moreover, with almost 80 percent of the 3,470 engineering colleges promoted and managed by private entrepreneurs, it made good sense to evaluate and rank the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges to enable parents and students to choose the most suitable from among them. “The gap between the curriculums of engineering colleges and industry requirements is widening by the day because of minimal industry-academy collaboration. This coupled with the proliferation of engineering institutions in the private sector has created…
