As published in India Today's Aspire on 04/03/2016.
I was recently at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where India's exasperating diversity was in full display. I was in a campus which housed a majority of Hindi speaking students studying in an institute with English as the medium of instruction; in a city that is majorly Bengali speaking.
Later that evening they grooved to a Kannada song written by a Muslim poet and the following day, they grooved to a Marwari song originally sung by a Muslim folk singer. Even in such diversity, there are some things that make one uniquely Indian. While much has been written about some of the country's biggest obsessions such as cricket, cinema and religion, let me tell you about a lesser discussed Indian obsession.
Since Independence in 1947, India, a country with over a billion people has produced only 26 Olympic medals and the best India has ranked in the International Mathematical Olympiad is 7th. However, something that India churns out in abundance is an enormous number of engineers. My personal interest in this story began at the age of 19, when I was still halfway through engineering school and I realised I couldn't be happy with a career in engineering.
While 20 per cent of 16 to 17 year-olds from the UK and 30 per cent from the US are interested in an engineering career, in India, the rate is an astounding 80 per cent; the highest in the world.
My friends and I consequently founded a start-up that exclusively sold engineering-theme-based T-shirts. Our efforts not only earned me the title of one of India's top 30 student entrepreneurs, but also resulted in countless emails from engineering students across the country. I then moved to Bangalore, where the adage goes, 'if you throw a stone in the air, there is a chance it will hit a dog or an engineer.' In Bangalore, I worked for a start-up that essentially sold chai, India's favourite beverage. After spending two years in Bangalore and still not finding happiness, I decided to quit. Like most engineers, I didn't know how my life ended up where it did. Like most Indian engineers, I spent all of it living exactly as society wanted me to, but here I was approaching the quarter life and wondering if I had made most of my limited time on earth. So, I set upon figuring it out for myself. With initial funding from a friend and subsequently, through a crowd-funding campaign, 300 odd souls from across the planet contributed to this journey helping me spend the next two years travelling across India unravelling this massive phenomenon. I found that in India, you become an engineer first and then decide what to do in life. At the end of the journey, I lost a camera full of images to theft but found a story I wanted to tell the world. Here are ten things I thought every student should know about engineering.
1) On April 7, 2013, 1.4 million candidates appeared for the JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), making it one of the biggest single-day exams in the known history of mankind. That is, basically more number of people appearing for a single exam on a day in a country than the total number of people who globally appeared for the GRE and GMAT put together in 2013.
2) While 20 per cent of 16 to 17 year-olds from the UK and 30 per cent from the US are interested in an engineering career, in India, the rate is an astounding 80 per cent; the highest in the world. More than half of these children take up engineering as a career option either because of their parents or because they don't know what else to do.
3) Indian parents prefer a 'successful career' for their child over their 'happiness' or 'fulfilling their potential' while their counterparts in countries like Canada, Australia, US, and UK believe in the exact opposite. In India, you have dreams and then you have your parents' dreams. But you always start with the latter.
4) With a recorded growth of 35 per cent in the last five years in India, the coaching industry is a grand scheme and is likely to touch $40 billion by 2015. Today, a whopping 87 per cent of primary school children and up to 95 per cent students in high schools receive private tutoring in metros, the highest in the world. That makes the engineering coaching industry even bigger than Bollywood. The cost of educating a child in of these coaching classes put together with hostel and other expenses is around Rs 2 lakh a year.
5) India has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world with examrelated stress being the leading cause. Every 90 minutes, a teenager tries to commit suicide. Academic pressure accounts for 99 per cent of suicides in the age group between 12 and 18 years. Around 20 kids kill themselves everyday due to intolerable examination stress.
6) Summer is generally at its peak with temperatures soaring at a sultry 45 degrees in many parts of the country, but for millions of teenagers in India, the heat from the mighty old sun is the least bothering. In April 2012, a little over half a million candidates appeared for an exam, contesting for a measly 10,000 seats, thus making it the most competitive educational examination. In 2012, Harvard University accepted 5.9 per cent of applicants. The world's top engineering schools, MIT and Stanford had acceptance rates of 8.9 per cent and 6.63 per cent, respectively. These children in India were cluelessly fighting an acceptance rate of a meagre and an astounding 2 per cent.
7) India produces more engineers annually than twice the population of Iceland. If engineering were a religion, it would be the fifth most populous religion in India.
8) More than 80 per cent of India's engineers are unemployable. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, around 2.22 lakh engineering graduates applied for 368 peon posts. India ranks 81 in the Global Innovation Index. Even a country like Malta, with a population of less than half a million, ranks higher.
9) Nearly 16 per cent of start-ups in the Silicon Valley have an Indian co-founder, the highest for any immigrant community. Indians are the fastest growing foreign student community in the US.
10) Engineers comprise 90 per cent of students at the Indian Institute of Management (IIMs). All of the 10 most valuable start-ups in the country have founders or co-founders with engineering degrees. The current RBI governor of the country, the current defence minister, some accomplished sportspersons, musicians, bestselling authors, and the vast majority of the bureaucracy are all engineering graduates.