If there’s one profession that can easily be tagged with India, that would be engineering. Even regarded as India’s great obsession, engineering is among the most sought-after courses. This is evident in the number of engineering graduates Indian universities produce annually to add to the working engineers in the field. No wonder the country is an engineering powerhouse. India engineers are the global driving force in industrial, healthcare and technology.
India Engineers (Source: Pinterest)
That’s what we know in the macro. Apart from that, there are other interesting statistics that India has when it comes to engineering:
- A record-breaking 1.4 million candidate appeared for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), the biggest single-day exams.
- The UK has 20 percent of the 16 to 17 year olds interested in engineering, while US has 30 percent and India with an impressive 80 percent, the highest in the world.
- Parents from Canada, Australia, US, and UK prefer a ‘fulfilling their potential’ profession while those from India want their kids to pursue a ‘successful’ career.
- A whopping 87 percent of primary school children and up to 95 percent of students in high schools have private tutors, the highest in the world. It posed a growth of 35% in the last five years in India.
- India has one of the highest youth suicide rates that root from stress in exams. Every 90 minutes, a teenager tries to commit suicide. Academic pressure is the number one cause of suicides among 12-18 years old. Around 20 kids resort to suicide because of intolerable examination stress.
- In April 2012, over half a million aspirants took an exam in India to take only 10,000 slots, making it the most competitive educational examination. It is an acceptance rate of 2 percent; while Harvard has 5.9 percent, MIT with 8.9, and Stanford with 6.63 percent acceptance rate in engineering schools.
- India produces more engineers annually than twice the population of Iceland. If engineering was a religion, it will count as the fifth populous in India.
- More than 80% of Indian engineers are unemployable. In the state of Uttar Pradesh, around 2.22 lakh engineering graduates applied for 368 peon posts.
- About 16 percent of Silicon Valley startups have an Indian co-founder, the highest for any immigrant community.
- Indian Institute of Management has students that are 90% in engineering. All of the 10 most valuable startups in the country have founder of co-founders with engineering degrees, adding up to the prominent and accomplished persons in India.
