By Arvind Raman & Vineet Gupta
Engineering and engineers in India have been a force to reckon with, and rightly so. But, as they say, the only factor continual is adjust. The state of engineering and technologies education in India as well should adjust and evolve with the altering instances. Reports recommend that a huge percentage of the 1.3 million engineers graduating annually in India are unemployable. Engineering seats in a lot of colleges stay unfilled. Last year, the AICTE decided not to grant permission to any new affiliated engineering college. On the other hand, we are all acutely conscious that technologies is the new language of the planet and is impacting every single sphere of our lives. One may possibly think about that we have to have more technologies education, not much less. How can we reinvent engineering and technologies education in India and what can we understand from institutions globally? With a gross enrolment ratio of only 26% in greater education, India desires a lot of new universities to provide greater education to its extremely young population.
In 2008, the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) convened some of the most achieved engineers and scientists about the planet to propose 14 grand challenges for engineers to resolve so that humanity may possibly thrive on a healthful planet Earth via the 21st century and beyond. Since then, the NAE’s grand challenges for engineering have inspired the engineering profession to feel large and tackle some of the world’s most wicked challenges—such as to engineer much better medicines, safe cyberspace, handle the nitrogen cycle, make solar power economical, or provide access to clean drinking water.
The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are also complicated worldwide grand challenges awaiting the next generation of engineers. The 1st amongst them is the elimination of poverty. As Nelson Mandela stated, “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.” Engineers and engineering ingenuity are playing a essential part in the eradication of poverty. Examples involve low-price earnings-boosting technologies for little holder farmers, enhancing maternal and kid well being via point-of care diagnostics in rural locations, and empowering impoverished communities to use renewable power and assure their personal clean drinking water supplies.
India has its personal grand challenges whether or not access to healthcare, enhancing mastering outcomes in Indian key education, getting a low-cost and sustainable replacement for plastic, enhancing efficiencies of the meals provide chain, creating a powerful manufacturing economy to assistance livelihoods, securing our cyberspace or guaranteeing clean drinking water for absolutely everyone.
There are 3 vital methods that the grand challenges for engineering can have a key influence on engineering education. First, the grand challenges are the guiding ‘north star’ for the profession, reminding engineers that no matter what the disruptive technologies du jour is, they have to have to preserve a concentrate on how these technologies can be used to tackle these grand challenges.
Secondly, grand challenges shatter the silos of standard engineering disciplines. Economical solar power may possibly demand the components or chemical engineer to style the new higher efficiency photovoltaic material, the electrical and computer system engineer for integrated electronics, sensors and grid integration, the computer system scientist to style algorithms that run solar energy plants effectively, the mechanical engineer for the manufacturing, the civil engineer to integrate solar cells and power systems into buildings, and the biological engineer to use bio-inspired suggestions to make solar cells more successful. Decades-old siloed know-how in these disciplines converges collectively as multidisciplinary engineering approaches are required to tackle these challenges. Institutions are becoming forced to feel how they can collapse the standard boundaries of engineering disciplines to make engineering education interdisciplinary.
Thirdly, solving the grand challenges calls for a deep understanding of culture, politics, enterprise and entrepreneurship and partnerships with civic society and private sector so that technological options are basically scaled up and adopted by the society. Engineers have to have to be capable to interact closely with sociologists, anthropologists, gender and cultural specialists, behavioural economists, policy professionals, private sector, and above all closely companion with communities to assure that options are human-centric, in line with cultural norms and economically and environmentally sustainable. To style for society, engineers will have to have to comprehend society and engineering education in some sense is incomplete with no an understanding of society. Integrating social sciences, humanities and entrepreneurship in the engineering curriculum is therefore crucial.
For India, the grand challenge method to engineering education has the prospective to spend wealthy dividends. It tends to make engineering curriculum interdisciplinary, integrates it strongly with the liberal arts and graduates a new generation of students who can innovate to resolve challenges and therefore be relevant and ‘employable’. This not only assists build an ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship, but also assists resolve some of our toughest societal challenges.
The NAE’s grand challenge scholar programme has been taken up by a lot of universities as a way for students to obtain multidisciplinary teaming abilities though much better understanding human society. Still, standard universities have restricted capacity to pivot and provide such experiences for all their engineering students. Greenfield institutions have the prospective to adopt the grand challenge method as a aspect of their DNA and construct new education pedagogies ground-up. However, this will demand such institutions to feel differently on all dimensions—what curriculum they construct, how they recruit and train faculty, and how they impart know-how and abilities.
The post-Covid-19 planet will accelerate the pace of digital transformation. To assistance navigate this new planet, India and the planet will have to have more engineering graduates, not much less. The premium on technologies talent is going to be greater, not reduced. Every engineer will be more employable than ahead of. However, these graduates will fundamentally have to have distinctive competencies and have to have to be educated differently: A broad-based study of interdisciplinary modern technologies and society, and the mindset to deal with uncertainty, to innovate, to self-reflect and to collaborate. We have to have a new playbook for engineering education.
Raman is executive associate dean of Engineering, Purdue University, US, and member of Plaksha University’s Academic Advisory Board Gupta is founder and trustee of Plaksha University as properly as of Ashoka University