Engineers are the designers of the World. From the simplest of things like a pen to the most complex machines like rockets, all are engineered. All the luxuries and comforts that we enjoy today, are made possible only because of the rapid development in technology.
Each year India on an average produces about 12-15 lakh skilled and trained engineers. In every nook and corner of the country we can find an engineering college. Then why is it that India has still remained a developing country? It’s quite obvious that the reason is ‘Brain-Drain’. Yeah..You heard it right its ‘Brain-Drain’ and not corruption or politicians. If human resource is retained everything else will come on track automatically. Even if 3/4th of Indian Einsteins are retained, we would have witnessed a India which would outweigh USA too.
Who other than an engineering student can help us understand more about this disaster.
Akand Sitra a Biotech student from IIT Madras would throw some light about the same.
Arshitha: Basically, I'm dealing with a project which is mostly concerned about the professional ethics and things like that. Before, I bother you with that question; I would want you to share your opinion about 'BRAIN_DRAIN' especially in engineering sector.
Akand: The whole education system in India has been of no use, as most of the students who get higher education from India's government tend to go abroad and work for "foreign" companies and leave India behind.
I am strongly against this because India is paying so much to develop us and our skills, but we are utilizing them for the welfare of other countries. It’s a waste of India's resources. Indirectly, we are just giving away our potential and our success to others. Being such a large country and with a population of over 1.2 billion, we could have become a developed nation/a superpower long back. But, we are not utilizing our sources for ourselves, but for others. The main problem of this is, the "selfishness" of the people, the foreign countries pay better so they flock and work for them making India more downtrodden. The only way to prevent this is, the entrepreneurs should make more Indian based companies, offer higher salaries and a better standard of living.And make our Indian people aware of the harm they are causing to their own motherland.They need to be a little less selfish and think of repaying the govt for all its services by becoming their own human resource..
Arshitha: Okay. I completely agree with you on this. But what do you think is the best solution to this problem?
Akand: As I said, more Indian based companies should be made. They need to offer higher salaries (as people only think about money) and they have to increase the perks...And personally I think, this is already being done right now.... at least the IT sector and the consulting firms are...
Arshitha: Now coming to the next question, Indian Institute of Technology is one of the premier institutes in India. Only the brightest minds get to graduate from there. You being a student of one such Institute, tell us the education system there. In the sense, that is it more about rote learning or are innovations encouraged?
Akand: This is one of my favorite questions. After learning, byhearting, mugging continuously for 2 years, i was shocked at the sudden change in the learning system here.The IIT system is way different from the usual education system in India. It’s a relative grade based system, a CGPA based system. The main idea behind this kind is not to grade students absolutely.If some one gets 30 on 100 and no one else can cross him. In school, it is considered as fail, but in here, that student will be the topper as the marks are all relative. Recently, even CBSE has been changed to this format.the other thing about IIT is, Academics is not everything, there will be some activity every week or the other. Like we have inter-hostel technical, literary and sports competitions which will go through out the year.
There will be some 10 competitions in each category, so that will be around 30 competitions in a period of 8 months. on top of this, there are many clubs like music club, nss,ncc, swimming, gym, quiz club, CFI(centre for innovation) etc. The best among the lot is the two college festivals - Shaastra and Saarang. shaastra is an ISO certified student organized technical festival. Saarang is a cultural festival... The main reason why these festivals are so different is, they are fully organized by the students.
Preparation for 3 months, coordination among 1000 people, brings out the managerial skills and team work skills. So on top of academics, there is a lot more going on everyday in the campus of which one can be a part of which helps in gaining a lot of skills and values. On a whole, the true meaning of education is achieved.
Arshitha: Why do u think not many Engineers prefer Government services?
Akand: Well I’m not sure about other colleges, in case of an IIT u r wrong.According to the placement list; many IITians get placed in govt jobs like shipping yards, ntpc etc. on one condition, the package of the job.They do prefer a high paying job to a mediocre govt job, but if the govt job is powerful and high enough, most of them tend to take up these jobs.But when you see the percentage, not many govt companies come for placements whereas a lot of private companies come and ask the colleges itself for placement, so any student would like to grab the opportunity which is offered to him rather than go look up for other jobs.A job package is the total salary a particular job pays, the extra perks involved and the amount of work to be done.Most of the people try to optimize the amount of work tension and the pay they get and take up jobs. This is from an IIT perspective.
Other colleges, students usually work hard and don’t care about the work tension; they usually go for the highest paying jobs. Some other local colleges don’t get companies for placement. So the students over there need to apply to companies on their own and get jobs...
And engineers usually prefer a high paying private job as there is a scope for development and go to higher positions,which lacks in a govt job, where they are stuck in the same position for years.
Arshitha: Please tell us something about your project ‘Travel LIVE!’
Akand:
First of all I would like to tell about Cfi (centre for innovation) here in IIT madras. It’s a thinking cell where if you come up with some idea and it’s feasible and important, you get funds to start that project from the institute. A bunch of us, all first years at that time had got an idea and approached CFI and we got selected for the project to start.
Our idea was simple....our campus is huge, so we have campus buses running around all the day for free.
If you are standing in a bus stop and waiting for the bus, you wouldn’t exactly know how long the bus will take to come and how crowded will it be.
So, we have put a GPS tracker on the buses, where the coordinates of the bus will be sent to a server every 30 seconds or so.And the user standing in a bus stop can SMS our server number to retrieve the GPS coordinates.
So, with one SMS, he will know where the bus is, and according to an algorithm he will also know how long the bus is going to take to come to that bus stop.We also have a mechanism to count the number of people boarding the bus, so we send that also as a part of the SMS.So, the user will get a reply saying that the bus is "here", it will take so much "time" to come to the required bus stop and so "many" people are there in the bus.
We would give the occupancy in percentage rather than in numbers.
