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Why I became an Engineer
First of all let me tell you why I came to engineering, because that will tell you what is the role of a person who tries to get into some particular college at that period of time. We did not have much understanding when we were at our higher secondary level. I had an accidental interaction at a very young age, when I was about 7 years old, I was given a wrist watch and I tried to sleep with the watch. The watch gave a particular noise and I couldn’t sleep. So I opened the watch, and obviously, once I opened it, I could never put it back, and that was the end of the watch. And that startled my mind that somebody might have done a remarkable job by bringing all the components together, because it did not take much time for me to break out those particular parts.
The second experience was that one day when we were in the class, when I was in 10th standard, the teacher asked, some said doctor, some said engineer, some said something else. There was a majority of the people who wanted to say engineering. We had a group and we decided to sit down and find out why we wanted to be engineers. That was the starting point, where we started talking in terms of engineering, what engineering is for us.
My discontentment with Engineering Education
Unfortunately when I went to the engineering college it was far from what we thought what engineering was, and what engineering we wanted to do. In the curriculum, in the kinds of things we were taught or not taught. we were not really trying to work what we wanted to work. therefore I support there is certain amount of change that we need to make. When I graduated, I went to IBM. I was also selected in air force. So I went to see to what airforce is all about. Ultimately I thought to try to get back into academics, so that probably if I can influence the engineering education so that the next generation can be better in terms of technology as well as curriculum.
We hate to dirty our hands
Engineers or scientists or technologists, all of them are going to contribute only to that extent that they are honest, sincere, hardworking and have a passion for the job they are doing. It doesn’t matter what job you are doing, even if it is a shop-floor job. One of the most important things that we must understand in this country, we hate to dirty our hands, we hate to work on the shop-floor, because probably we have not understood that being a hand co-ordinator or rim co-ordinator is very important in terms of being able to be creative.
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We have forgotten experimentation & exploration in today’s engineering education
That is another particular part of the story, that we in today’s engineering education, have forgotten experiments, forgotten the way we want to explore and that is another very damaging thing that is happening.
Today engineering education’s course curricula does not emphasize on application of knowledge, application of. your classroom education into making something that is fruitful to the society. Therefore we do not have project oriented education, experimental oriented education because nobody wants to invest in that type of a thing. That is probably one of the major challenges we have to face in this country. As you go up, as you go for M. Tech or as you go for PhD. And we are producing engineers who haven’t touched any modern instrument, or use any to make measurements. If you are not able to measure a thing, you are not in the field of science. Science requires minimal metrics, and because of that it requires for us to understand that until and unless that kind of an attitude is given to a student he will not be able to contribute, either in terms of innovation or in terms of knowledge, or in terms of real answers to the problems of the world.
Solving the local problems, is the key
Indiadoesn’t have any particular shortage of problems. Everywhere we go, we have enormous number of problems, but are we doing anything? Even in the premier engineering colleges, even in IITs, are they doing anything to challenge the problems faced by this country. Why aren’t we having a course with MSMEs? AtMahamayaTechnicalUniversitythe second and third year students go to the neighboring MSMEs, try to find out what products they are making, what processes and what materials they are using. So that if they can come back and give a report of that, we can try to say how we can improve that, we can have a project on that. If we can make a contribution, that will change. That is the kind of innovation that we are trying to do in the curriculum.
A Risk Free Society is detrimental
The problem inIndiatoday is ultimately very few engineers turn out to be entrepreneurs that is very much required today. Finally I would like to say that innovation, creativity does not happen if you are trying to make a risk-free society,. You cannot afford to create until and unless you are ready to take a risk, or suffer a loss or even face a failure, the end product may be acceptable, maybe not. if u are ready to learn from your failure, then only you can be creative or innovative, get up and solve the problems of the country.
Many decades have passed without really looking at our problems. from the point of view of solving them. That is why today there are so much of problems in this country, because we have neither looked at the social problems, or economic problems nor the structure or political problems that this country is facing.