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41st anniversary of The Times of India, Bengaluru: Engineering the future
In the most sought-after engineering college of Karnataka, a four-year computer science seat gets lapped up for a fee of Rs 70 lakh. And if you thought this was too steep a price to pay, consider this: Students from across the country queue at this college as early as December of the previous year.
Karnataka, and, more specifically Bengaluru, has been one of the hotspots for engineering education since the 1970s and a pioneer in private technical education in the country.
Of the 213 colleges affiliated to
Visvesvaraya Technological University
(VTU), more than 80 are Bengaluru-based.
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When Bharat Ratna Sir M Visvesvaraya established the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) in 1917, it was the fifth engineering college in the country.
If that was a humble beginning, then the picture started changing drastically from the late 1950s.
That was when the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, in his clarion call for industrialisation, said, 'industrialise or perish'. In the years that followed, at least eight big-ticket public sector industrial units came to Bengaluru, including Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), and Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT).
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'With an ever-growing demand for engineers in the country, engineering colleges started mushrooming,' recalled Seetharamu A S, former faculty at the Institute for Social and Economic Change.
'Basic sciences grew, too. Indian Institute of Science was paving the way for this. Meanwhile, there was a lot of interest in spectroscopy, with Nobel laureate C V Raman's work. All this led to an increased demand for engineering education in the state,' he said.
Then came privatisation of professional colleges in Karnataka. In 1946, BMS College of Engineering (BMSCE) became the first private sector initiative in engineering education in India. Soon, several others followed.
'The ecosystem for science and engineering was already set in the city with the PSUs in 1960s. At a time when other states were just beginning to set up private engineering colleges, Karnataka already had 50-60 of those.
However, Karnataka did not unscrupulously increase the number of colleges and maintained it at 213, thereby ensuring quality education,' said K N Subramanya, principal of R V College of Engineering.
Karnataka was one of the first states to build an umbrella university VTU that brought all technical education under one roof. While many educationists were not in favour of the affiliation system, they agreed that formation of VTU brought in standardisation and quality in technical education.
Karnataka was also one of the first states to bring in a Common Entrance Test (CET) in 1994 that ensured meritocracy in admissions, setting benchmarks in engineering education.
As a result of these initiatives, in the 1990s, Bengaluru emerged the cradle of IT revolution in the country. The rest, as they say, is history! Bengaluru's story in engineering education is now about keeping up with the times.
S Sadagopan, the founder director at International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore, said: 'While institutes like IITs provide quality education, they have not been able to scale up student intake to the extent required.
However, many colleges in Bengaluru are now providing quality education with intake as high as 1,000 for some branches. They're able to offer quality education at scale. This is Karnataka's contribution to the nation,' he observed.
In addition, there are private universities offering engineering education. Colleges from other states and cities are also venturing into Bengaluru to have a piece of the pie.
With artificial intelligence (AI) taking the world by storm, colleges have also undergone makeovers to keep pace.
Currently, there are 133 streams available, of which at least 105 are related to computer science and its allied programmes.
'Bengaluru's evolution into India's premier engineering education hub is deeply tied to its thriving tech ecosystem, the early establishment of top-tier institutions, and close industry-academia collaboration,' said Neeti Sharma, CEO, Teamlease Digital.
'Over the past two decades, top engineering colleges in the city have consistently attracted high-quality talent from across India due to robust placement records and proximity to leading tech companies,' she further said.
'With around 12,000 IT/software firms and more than 10,000 startups, Bengaluru offers unmatched industry exposure to engineering students. The city's colleges routinely see the highest number of companies visiting for campus placements,' Sharma added.
'The packages offered are also among the highest in the country. Institutions such as IIIT Bangalore and IISc report average packages of Rs 27-28 LPA, with top offers reaching Rs 65-86 LPA,' Sharma said.
According to Sharma, core engineering domains, especially semiconductors, are seeing renewed interest. 'Bengaluru is home to a vast majority of India's chip design workforce, with firms such as AMD, Qualcomm, and Intel expanding their design operations,' she said.
It's not just engineering, but colleges in other streams also have mushroomed in the state. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-22, Bengaluru Urban district has the highest density of colleges in the country, with 1,106 institutions. In comparison, Jaipur has 703, Hyderabad 491, Pune 475 and Prayagraj 398.
What Bengaluru has always lacked is an IIT, but there are now colleges in the city that can boast of education on par with the best in the country.
