60% of engineering graduates unemployed

NEW DELHI: More than 60% of the eight lakh engineers graduating from technical institutions across the country every year remain unemployed, according to the All India Council for Technical Education. This is a potential loss of 20 lakh man days annually. That's not all. Less than 1% of engineering students participate in summer internships and just 15% of engineering programmes offered by over 3,200 institutions are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA). All this points to the huge variation in standards of technical colleges in the country, a majority of whom churn out graduates who are not employable. To buck this trend, the ministry of human resource development is planning a major revamp of India's technical education. The strategy involves rolling out the single National Entrance Examination for Technical Institutions from January 2018, linking annual teacher training as a must for approval of the institution, mandatory induction training to enrolled students and annual revision of curriculum. According to a senior MHRD official, NEETI (for admission to engineering programmes) will be the first exam to be conducted by the National Testing Service (NTS), which will be completely computer-based. "In all probability, NTS will be ready by January 2018 to conduct the NEETI as well as National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) for medical courses. The exams will be conducted multiple times in a year," said the official. As per plans, the first NEETI exam is likely to be scheduled for December 2017-January 2018, followed by another one in March 2018 and the third on May 2018. The official added that NTS will also conduct entrance test for IIT.