Research Of Engineering And Technical Education In India

As an important part of professional higher education, engineering and technical education in India began in the modern colonial period. With its independence, the federal government gave great importance to the revival of technical education in order to achieve the true sense of independence. This resulted in an emergence of world-class universities like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Science(IISc), Indian Institute of Management(IIM), etc. With the promotion from a national platform, the economic reform in the late20th century, coupled with reforms in higher education worldwide and private higher education sector, Indian technical education has achieved great development with clear levels and is well-structured. This development has supported India’s9%GDP growth rate in recent years and significantly strengthened the nation altogether. For a developing country of over one billion people who are multi-ethnic, multi-religious and are in constant conflict, we can say it’s a miracle.The two ancient civilizations of the world, China and India, with diversified culture and similar sufferings in colonial aggression, have now transformed into rising powers. Both economies which are transitioning from planned to market economies are attracting similar problems. These circumstances make higher education face many problems, such as the pressure of increasing admissions and maintaining quality of education, the balance between inadequate public funds and expansion of scale, and structural imbalance which gives rise to unemployment. Thus the research of development in higher education in India could be very beneficial for China. Owing to the similarities between the two countries and the rising influence in world political&economic scenario in recent years, some western scholars predict from long-term policies and measures that India will surpass China. Since then, the comparison of "The Dragon and Elephant" has always been the talk. Hence, we need to learn from the success of Indian’s higher education segment and promote the development of the same in China.The Western developed countries like the US and European nations are often considered main subjects of research on higher education. India has been taken as the prime subject at very rare occasions. After30years of reform and development, our counterpart of higher education has established a wide range of subjects, high quality teaching pattern, and a large structural scale. However, in professional fields, there are many dilemmas. Whereas the overall experiences of Indian education pattern, which include success stories as well as failing experiments, are obviously of great reference value for our system. Taking into account the fact that nobody is focusing on this area in domestic research, I target this as the main subject for my thesis.My thesis aims at research into Indian technical education. In the first chapter,I have taken the religious and cultural education as the background in analysis of the historical context of the development of technical education. According to the characteristics of the educational bodies, educational system, and academic structure, the development of Indian technical education is divided into three major stages:the colonial period; post independence until the late1980s; the1980s to the present. In the early stages of the colonial period, the technical education was of small-scale and of poor quality. In the second phase, the technical education was directed by national strategy. The third stage is characterized with the influence of state, the market factors and the emergence of private technical education. In the current situation, the technical education can be divided into four distinct categories:1) On the basis of type, size and quality of the institutions:the Indian Institute of Technology, National Institute of Technology, the state established technical colleges and the private technical colleges;2) Size of institutions and student scale has greatly increased;3) There is a huge gap in the quality of teachers and students, infrastructure, funding status and employment opportunity for graduates.4) This transformation of education from religious to secular nature, putting technical education from a sideline position to a dominant one, shows a panoramic view of the development of technical education in India.Chapter Two analyzes the characteristics of technical education in India. The focus is on the national effort, the diversity of the technical educational institutions, decentralization of education management structure and talent training system. In the analysis of National characteristics, the state is always found to have played a decisive role, whereas the market demand and the higher education development is in a secondary position; in the diversity of the technical educational institutions, technical education in India embodies a parallel coexistence of elite education and public education, diploma education and degree education; in the decentralized management structure, the Indian political system of democracy and decentralization, the technical education has a unique management system, that is, between the Government and higher education there is an intermediary organizations to connect the two. Between the colleges and the universities, decentralized management system is implemented to ensure the autonomy of universities so that they can try to create an atmosphere of academic independence and academic freedom, maximizing the vitality of the teachers and students; In the analysis of the uniqueness of the talent training system, the thesis explores the stringent admissions system, multiple subject, curriculum system and technical education of international standards. These four characteristics ensure a comprehensive and diversified development of technical education in India.Chapter Three analyzes the five major problems in Indian technical education system.1.) The imbalance in the development of the technical education:the polarization of the quality of education, the unbalanced structure of degree structure, the uneven regional distribution of the educational institutes;2) shortage of good teaching faculty;3) the lack of flexibility in management;4) unemployment and brain drain;5) the weak link between the technical education and industry needs. These five problems affect the better development of engineering education in India.Chapter Four explains how the academic triangle model of the state, market and higher education system, has hugely influenced the study of the strength and extent of each factor in the development of technical education in India, and the formation of four different types of educational institutions. I have come to the conclusion that in the development process of the technical Education, the state factors are the internal driving force, the market factors as the dominant power, and the higher education system as a hidden power. But in different types of educational institutions, the relationship of the three factors is different and have certain dynamic movement between them. Complemented by the triple helix model I try to explain the problems that these three factors of state, market and higher education has brought in the dynamic mechanism model, and try to come up with a solutionChapter Five concludes how the development of technical education in India can be beneficial to us:to promote the internationalization of higher education; to set up multi-level educational institutions; to encourage the coexistence of diploma education and degree education; to diversify the curriculum of higher education; to bring in democratic management system:to encourage the parallel existence of private education and public education; to help the rise of the triple helix of the State, Market and higher education system.