In Self Interest

Which is the best institute in India to go for campus recruitments? The obvious answer is the IITs. And the good news is that more IITs are coming up. Today we have 15 IITs, after the new ones came up in Ropar, Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabd, Patna, Jodhpur, Mandi, and Indore. But will IITs be enough to provide the talent that is required to run a country which is in a high growth mode. Obviously not. Today India produces 500,000 engineers every year, but the need is for more than 10,00,000 according to some experts.

The ICT industry as well as the enterprise users, which need the engineers most desperately, are not entirely wrong in expecting that it is the Government's job to build IIT like engineering colleges, but they might be hoping against hope. For most of such things today the Government's are not very keen to be the only investors. Thanks to Kapil Sibal, India's HRD minister, the Government has education and vocational training high on its agenda. And it is also focusing on quality of these institutes. The time is therefore right for the ICT industry to evaluate its role in building the country's tech educational infrastructure.

How can the industry partner in building India's tech education systems? This latest Dataquest T-School Survey on the status of tech institutes in India and how are they perceived by recruiters from ICT companies throws up some very interesting ideas.

For instance, industry-academia partnership is one parameter which is high on the recruiters' checklist. Clearly, number of computers per student and a Wi-Fi campus is not the only thing that HR heads are looking for when they decide on which campus to go to. Industry-academia interface is a high priority, and this survey shows that T-schools that are involving their faculty members and students in industry projects are ranked highly by recruiters. Now this is one area that ICT companies should actively look out for. There are so many institutes which really want to produce good students but fi nd it very diffi cult to partner with ICT companies to keep up with the latest.

I know that there are lots of apprehensions and constraints that these companies have in terms of engaging with little or unknown colleges, but it is time they took some risks. In the long term the industry will hugely benefi t by partnering with the academia. In fact there should be more active industry level plans towards this. Quality of teachers is another area that will benefi t from industry academia partnering.

It would be great if the Top 200 IT companies in India (including the MNCs) take it upon themselves to get actively involved in this direction, so that all the streams including hardware, software, training, BPO and telecom get covered. There might be initial hiccups and setbacks,but ultimately the industry will benefi t. The T-School survey shows that there are many recruiters who will go small colleges if they get students who are in sync with the ground reality.

IBRAHIM AHMAD/ ibrahima@cybermedia.co.in