IIT course in offing to train engg faculty

Course to focus more on research aspects; govt plans to train 30,000 in 12th five-year plan. Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Jan 2, 2012, 01:23:24 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Thousands of untrained faculty members of engineering colleges in India will soon get a chance to obtain a degree in engineering and training from Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) without joining the premier technical education institute or leaving their jobs.

Shortage of faculty had forced a large number of engineering colleges across the country to hire engineering graduates as teachers. But these graduates are not trained to be teachers and lack skills in orienting students towards research.

To tackle this enduring problem, the government has found a solution—an online part-time Masters’ degree in Engineering Education conducted by IITs. The course is aimed at focusing more on research aspects of engineering than just equipping students to clear the examination.

“The course, designed for faculty members in engineering colleges will be conducted online, through live video lectures, ensuring that the ‘students’ do not need to stop normal teaching duties,” said a member of the plannig committee headed by higher education secretary Vibha Puri Das.

The ministry plans to train 6,000-7,000 young faculty members each year. Training such numbers will require the participation of 1,500 faculty members of IITs and other institutions. The classes will be conducted in the evening and during weekends.

In addition, the Union government believes that the IIT faculty will be able to identify and motivate many of these candidates to pursue a part-time PhD programme.

On its own, the IITs are also expected to produce at least one PhD scholar in every department in the next five years.

In all, the government hopes to train around 30,000 faculty members in the 12th five-year plan period starting April 2012. The government also plans to start a new three-year programme to help post graduate students in IITs take up teaching.

The demand for faculty in engineering colleges is expected to rise by 70% by 2020.

The number of students acquiring technical education in India has increased to over two million from less than a million in 2007-08.

To make the students employable, the government wants the industry to run a pilot project to train faculty.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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