Engineering Colleges

Assam needs more engineering colleges and ones with quality teaching facilities. Though there are currently more than twenty engineering colleges in Assam, half of them are private colleges. While the government engineering colleges are doing well, people often complain that while the private colleges charge huge sums as fees from the students, their placement services are nowhere close to those of the government colleges. One, however, cannot say for sure whether the quality of teaching in the government institutions is uniformly good. This is evident from the fact that not many engineering graduates from Assam are getting recruited by the various central PSUs and private companies, including multinationals. The entry of engineering graduates from the state getting recruited in the railways too is very low. The Tata semiconductor plant at Jagiroad will recruit several hundred engineers. But how the engineering colleges of Assam have been preparing their students to get recruited in it is not immediately known. With the Namrup fertiliser plants heading for a revamp, a large number of vacancies will also arise there in the next few years. That a sizable number of engineering graduates of the state are getting into the services recruited through the Assam Public Service Commission (APSC) cannot be construed to be a very positive development. It is also a reality that a number of young graduates of the engineering colleges of the state have joined as clerks and office assistants in different state government departments. Given this scenario, it will be befitting to enquire of the engineering colleges of the state – both government and private – to inform the people about the placement or employment status of their graduates, say, in the past ten years. Simultaneously, the Government of Assam can also direct all the employers – central and state PSUs and private companies operating in the state – to provide information about the total number of engineers they have employed, as well as the total number of engineering graduates from the state who have been recruited by them in the past ten years.