CHALLENGES OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION IN INDIA

India with its vast infrastructure in Technical education has created a niche advantage in the globalized economic environment for the growth of its economy and national development. The growth of technical education in the last 25 years has been phenomenal as can be seen from the increase in number of institutions from 158 in 1980 to 1346 in 2005 and like wise increase in intake at engineering degree level from 28,500 to 4,52,260 during the same period. The multifold increase in intake and increase in number of institutions has already caused significant pressure on the quality of educations of engineering and technology. The main challenges the technical education has to respond are the challenge of:

· cultivating science in an engineering institution environment to revitalize the science base of modern engineering
· creating technology savvy campuses
· using Information Communication Technology (ICT) to enhance teaching effectiveness as also to create a knowledge centric learning environment
· creating a research culture at all levels including the undergraduate institutions
· harnessing the power of mind and utilizing the power connectivity to nurture talent of engineering students
· building faculty competence for improved teaching and creative research
· creating structures and mechanisms for Knowledge and Innovation Management
· transforming engineering institutions into Knowledge Enterprises
· providing an optimal mix of knowledge, skills and competencies to be addressed by innovating existing curriculum which is presently rigid and is heavily oriented towards core specialties
· Autonomy

The Indian Engineering education system is capable of greeting the above challenges. All it requires that the management of the institution and the members of faculty are inspired and motivated to create a technology savvy environment to leverage advantage of technology in education and create institutional systems for quality assurance at all levels. The Technical Education System has to undergo introspection on its weakness and take active steps to improve the quality of the educational processes.
· Effective Autonomy to Engineering Institutions to upgrade curricula at regular intervals to keep abreast of developments in technology as well as pedagogy.

· Effective Functional and Administrative Autonomy coupled with Accountability
· Shift emphasis from teaching to learning and encourage students-centric learning strategies and development of self learning tools
· Develop continuous teacher competence up gradation mechanism
· Put emphasis on obsolesce removal of infrastructure as well as teaching/learning evaluation process
· Strong interface with Industry i.e building Industry Institute partnership
· Create opportunities for student exchange with other countries, transfer of credits, appreciating cultural diversity, methods of working, engineering standards, work ethics, discipline, etc to enable them in later professional life to adjust to external environment easily.

Establish and strengthen quality assurance cell for collecting student and peer review of teachers performance, acting and initiating remedial measures for improvement based on these reviews and on external audit of the educational processes.