Blame industry for shoddy engineers

Blame industry for shoddy engineers

Industry has no stomach for high-quality R&D.

Addressing the 56th convocation of IIT Bombay, the prime minister charged institutions and faculty with the task of improving the quality of engineering and science education, bemoaning the fact that of the 7 lakh engineering graduates that India produced, quite a few did not possess the right sets of skills. He was on target only in part. Of course, educational institutions and their faculty have a big role in producing quality graduates. But a bigger share of the responsibility falls on their potential employers, industry. Indian industry lacks ambition. Very few companies perform any serious research and development. Most bright engineers end up as managers with little to do with engineering. The few bright engineers who stay on in engineering end up with multinational companies in India or abroad.

According to the World Bank, India spent 0.63% of GDP on R&D in 2015. In the same year, China spent more than 2% of GDP on R&D, Korea more than double that. Germany’s figure was close to 3%, France was not far behind. There was a time when Ericson could boast that it spent 3% of its revenue on R&D. One Chinese company, Huawei, spends anything up to 15% of its revenue on R&D. The pharma giants spend a fifth of their revenue on R&D. The tech giants are behind them, but not far behind and exceed them in absolute amounts. Such companies need quality researchers and pay their nerds attractive salaries. This leads talented people to train to become researchers at the highest level. The quest to train them makes educational institutions powerhouses of research, so as to attract the best. In India, companies want engineers either as MBAs or as relatively lowly paid grunt workers. The demand shapes the supply.

Policy can force Indian companies to rely on innovation as their competitive edge. Instead, policy cossets them with increasing protection from foreign competition. Marketing expenses are palmed off as tax-saving R&D. If the engineers in demand shifts from grunt workers to those who pirouette on the bleeding edge of technology, the quality of education will change; but not till then.