In the backdrop of Korea hosting a population comprising citizens identified by a most common name, it is humorously said that if you toss a stone in the streets of that country, it is most likely to land on the head of a Lee. In a similar vein, it can be said, even seriously, that if you shake hands with a  Bengalurean, you are most likely doing so with a software engineer. The term engineer, with its classical meaning as ‘to design and build something’ has lately come to mean much more, some of which may make the elderly fraternity feel disconnected with the modern world. Sales engineer, sound engineer, lighting engineer and so on are the modern professionals emerging out of the erstwhile set of civil engineer, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer, not to forget chemical engineer, who dominated the broad field of engineering until not too long ago. Courses offered by institutions for training youth in the newly emerging branches of engineering seem to be favoured in preference to the time-honoured branches.

Engineers who graduated from the institutions in the erstwhile Princely State of Mysore in the three or four broad branches of engineering mentioned above during the years before independence, a section among them identified as Mysore engineers, earned a niche for themselves by virtue of their track record in building industries, laying roads, constructing dams and so not only in the country but also abroad, which have endured to this day. Accolades are hard to be bestowed on their present day counterparts.

Both engineering graduates and institutions offering courses in various branches of the field are no longer a rarity, unlike in days past. Their number being counted in hundreds across many States seems to have brought down the lofty image that engineers enjoyed decades ago. The feature of more than a lakh engineering graduates from the country’s colleges annually, more than half of them not landing a job befitting their years of education, mirrors their poor credentials. More disheartening is the reported verdict of the country’s industrial circles that nearly 80 per cent of the engineering graduates are not employable in their establishments. Add to this is the fact that a majority of graduates from the prestigious IITs (15 of them in the country) prefer to leave the country’s shores seeking greener pastures abroad.

India’s most loved profession needs a reality check, as rightly opined by those who are keen observers of the current yawning gap between pedagogy and advance, in technology globally. The watchword for both the faculty of institutions offering engineering courses and their students is ‘If you chase perfection, you can catch excellence’ attributed to Vincent Thomas Lombardi (1913–1970), an outstanding sportsperson of America.