NEWS: Digital India takes lead in bridging IT industry, academia gap

[FREDERICK NORONHA <fred@bytesforall.org>]

IT-Education

Digital India takes lead in bridging IT industry, academia gap

by Imran Qureshi, India Abroad News Service

Bangalore, Feb 25 - The first step towards bridging the wide gap between the
expectations of the information technology (IT) industry and fresh
engineering graduates appears to have concluded successfully through a
training program for 44 engineering college teachers by software firm
Digital India.

In one of the few initiatives that the industry has taken to contribute to
the growing global demand for India's intellectual capital, observers say
teachers trained by Digital India can go forward and act as "ambassadors" to
help the industry and academia network with each other.

"Change in the IT industry is so rapid that colleges cannot keep pace either
with the volume and quality. Rather than just crib about it, we thought of
doing something about it. And the need is so large that all that we are
doing is drops in the ocean, small dents that we are making. But, the job is
much larger," Digital India CEO Som Mittal told IANS.

The fortnight-long residential program is the first exercise in a
multi-pronged approach to meet the challenge of a talent crunch in India's
IT industry head on. The program, conceived by Digital India in
collaboration with the Indian Institute of Information Technology,
Bangalore, and the Board for IT Education Standards (Bites), enjoys industry
support.

"The curriculum looks very good because it has been prepared by experts from
the industry," says Bites director K.R.S. Murthy.

Karnataka has increased the number of IT-related courses in its 82
engineering colleges, most of which are private institutions, as well as the
number of seats by 2,040 in the year 2000. The faculty, however, is said to
be out of sync with the needs of the industry.

"Typically, a company would require to put students through 16 to 18 weeks
of training. We need to bring the fresher on par with the industry
requirement. To be honest, we are not even capturing this as an investment.
It is actually like a running cost for us because every year. We need to put
them through two to three weeks of training to scale up their skills to meet
the fast changing developments in technology," Mittal said.

"Nearly eight to 10 percent of our compensation of around Rs.5 billion goes
into training. Except for the brief spell of training for the students of
Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), engineering college students need to
go through a long haul before being put to productive use," Azim Premji,
chairman of Indian software major Wipro, told reporters in an informal chat
recently.

The biggest impediment in enhancing the 50 plus percent growth of the
industry has been trained human resource.

"This is the first time we have been able to interact and understand the
needs of the industry by directly talking to a CEO of an IT company. The
syllabus is updated, but we have had no means of upgrading our knowledge
base to teach the students. It is in this context this program should be
made a continuous process, perhaps, every year or a semester," said T.
Rangaswamy of the Malnad Engineering College.

Out of the 44 faculty members attending the course, there were just two
doctorate holders and about 20 with a master degree. The remaining held just
bachelor's degree in their respective fields ranging from chemical
engineering to metallurgy or mechanical engineering or technology. But,
their teaching experience of a decade or so helps in such orientation
courses. The teacher, as Prasad Hegde of the KLE College, Belgaum, puts it,
has to upgrade his knowledge base through the Internet and libraries.

"We are hoping to bring in technology and scale up so that teachers can keep
pace with the fast developments that are taking place in the industry. The
National Center for Software Technology (NCST), which has course material
produced by experts, would be giving it to all the colleges. And, BITES will
perform as an exchange house between the industry and academia," Murthy
said.

--India Abroad News Service