The global market is in disarray. India can survive on the strength of its domestic market, but this calls for attention to the spatial spread of economic activity. The infrastructure for this in turn requires skilled personnel in volumes that are not even close to being met.
Engineering colleges are being set up at a frenetic pace all over India. But the mix of skills they produce is not tailored to the mix needed. Industrial training institutes (ITIs) are what we really need in much larger numbers, but funding seems to be going their way hardly at all. And they suffer from the lack of links to institutions higher up in the skills chain.
It might be instructive to go back to a time when the setting up of educational institutions in the country was more closely related to its manpower needs.
India has one of the oldest engineering colleges in the world. What in 2001 morphed into the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee was first started in 1847 as Roorkee College, soon renamed Thomason College after its visionary founder. What made the college unique for its time was that it was established to train civil engineers, when the term civil distinguished it from institutions for training military engineers. The skills imparted were the same, but the few formal engineering institutions in the world then existing were mostly under the rubric of the military (today, the term civil denotes a particular branch of engineering). Non-military engineers were taught through apprenticeship at the workplace. Professional education was functional, driven by need.
In a fascinating history of the new civil engineering college in Roorkee by K V Mittal, who taught there for many years, there are lessons for today. Education, particularly at the tertiary level, succeeds best when it is tailored to the skill requirements of the economy.
Roorkee College was a response by the colonial administration to the urgent need for restoration of pre-existing irrigation works, which had fallen into disuse with the political anarchy after the arrival of the British. Traditional management structures had collapsed, and the British administration needed to replace what had died. New works like the famous Solani aqueduct on the Ganga were started in 1842, to boost agricultural productivity in a fertile region, for a regime critically dependent on land revenue for its fiscal survival. The British engineers overseeing the new work were from the military. But they needed supplementary civil personnel with engineering skills. Roorkee, in close proximity to Solani, was chosen as a suitable location for a college to train non-military civil engineers.
Right from the start, the college had three streams: for engineers, overseers and suboverseers. Today, there is a very rigid distinction between degree granting colleges, and diploma granting institutions which impart training of a more hands-on variety. Thomason College made no such distinction. It was a residential college for all three streams.
Thomason College faced choppy waters, with a competing civilian institution chargeable to the Government of India being forcibly set up in England in 1869, whose graduates had prior claims on engineering jobs in India. What is relevant is that Thomason College survived. Its strength lay in the very wide range of skill levels on offer. Its initial core of broad spectrum education in all branches of engineering continued on multiple levels, to the point where its output of prized overseers and technicians threatened to dominate its reputation. But it continued to produce outstanding engineers like Sir Ganga Ram, famous for his canal irrigation network in the part of Punjab now in Pakistan, and Sir William Willcocks, who built the Aswan dam in Egypt.
The institution was renamed Roorkee University in 1949. In 1958, its famed two-year training course for technicians was upgraded to three years, funding came from the United Nations for training of students from other countries in Asia, and a new Diploma Polytechnic was created within the University to house it.
Then all of a sudden in 1964, the Diploma Polytechnic was closed, and its staff either absorbed into other departments of the University or scattered to the four winds. The ostensible reason was that there was another competing polytechnic in the town of Roorkee. The real reason was that a slew of IITs had come up in the fifties, with integrated science and engineering departments, and an academic aspiration that was wrongly thought to demand an appropriate distance from training in manual engineering skills. Roorkee University was pushed into shedding the very features that had made it closely integrated into the skill requirements of the Indian economy.
Another engineering institution which provided education at several levels of skill, originated in the Jamalpur workshop of the East Indian Railway, established in 1862. The final and most academic stream, introduced in 1927, has produced engineers valued for their hands-on engineering capabilities. E Sreedharan of Delhi Metro fame is one of them.
The IITs have achieved world renown. Aspirants for the IIT entrance examination have created a private industry in coaching centres, which may account for as much as one per cent of GDP (if service sector GDP were properly measured, which it is not). But aside from software, where famous practitioners like N R Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani were trained in the IIT system, the alumni of these institutions are as likely to be found adorning academic departments of finance, management and science, as in departments of engineering.
Meanwhile, Indian infrastructure suffers from a severe shortage of well-trained technicians in manual engineering skills. The configuration of IITs cannot now be altered, but what is certainly possible is the fostering of close links between these, and ITIs falling within a reasonable radius. ITI trainees fortunate enough to benefit from these links can then impart remedial training in the workplaces which will compete to hire them. Meanwhile, our infrastructure plans can forge ahead only if we admit Chinese and Korean technicians to come and train our people.
The author is honorary visiting professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi
