Monday, August 6, 2001		Article

Real work is much more than theory
Damodar Agrawal

FOR quite some time now, there has been a mushroom growth of computer schools claiming to make a student a computer wizard. Along with these, there has been an unprecedented extension of the IT departments in the universities. This was the result of an euphoria about computers being the panacea of all ills.

Apart from the IITs and the regular engineering colleges teaching computer science, the Central and the state governments opened a number of new colleges for IT teaching.

Though the initial euphoria is now slowing down, experts believe that it will soon catch up and the employment potential of an IT graduate will soon rise in the country.

This is being realised even by the government. The Central Government seems to be determined to win the IT battle at all costs. Those who have read the report the Minister Murli Manohar Joshi presented to the Prime Minister in January 2001 will corroborate it.

The report that was titled "IT Manpower — Challenge and Response" proposed to spend Rs 2,000 crore during the next seven years from the Central fund. This is not enough, according to experts. It is not even 1 per cent of what the country earns from the software and related services. The industry would require 22 lakh professionals by 2006-07.

Not that the Centre has absolutely no plan to meet the challenge, but as you read the report and other documents, you will only be convinced that the efforts are more theoretical than practical.

For example, the Centre is at present busy just about categorising the existing colleges of computer education. A task force of the HRDM has already specified 15 Category-I institutions including the IITs, the IIMs and the IIS, Bangalore, for focus on postgraduate programmes, 50 Category-II institutions (Regional Engineering Colleges etc) for undergraduate teaching, and 200 Category-III colleges (Government Engineering Colleges) plus 550 self-financing colleges. Together these institutions will perform the Herculean task of producing as many computer engineers as the country may need by the end of the decade.

Even as a semi-literate can see, this is not going to solve our problem. And this is being taken advantage of by individuals running their own business of computer education. They claim to teach you everything that the renowned IT institutions teach in their prestigious premises, including e-development and the complex processes of preparing the defence software.

These are obviously some of the most specialised areas of computer education. The infrastructure required for these is not available even to all IITs. Most of the computer teaching shops in Chennai, Bangalore or Hyderabad are just taking the advantage of the government’s failure, to achieve complete computer literacy.

This is not in any way to say that every private computer education company is a fraud. But before one joins an institution it’s antecedents need to be checked. The market-value of their products must also be assessed. There is another side of the coin that the learner must make sure of. The recent slowdown in California has shown that while the highly qualified professionals were fired, those who showed good results were retained. Education is different from professional performance. Most of the private computer teaching shops claim to make you computer wizard in a trice. Such ‘big’ companies are no more than local departmental stores.

The Central and the state governments are mainly responsible for such an imbroglio. In a reckless way, they have not only been granting recognition to private classes, but also send their own officers to attend them. This sends a wrong signal. People think they must be genuine and competent, but when the reality dawns upon them, it is already too late.

In Delhi, the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University of Delhi Government has recently given affiliation to a number of private institutes teaching the computer science. Taking advantage of this raised status of theirs, they have hiked their fee without improving the quality.

On the part of the Delhi Government this was a political move, to please Delhiites. Jointly with some private companies the government is also running its own computer centres.

Taking advantage of the euphoria some constituent colleges of Delhi University too started their own courses in Bachelor of Computer Science and Bachelor of Computer Application. Later, the students realised much to their chagrin that the courses were not recognised by the UGC.