16,000 engineering students at Punjab varsity fail in maths

“In total 23,000 students wrote the exam, which means 70 per cent failed. It wasn’t due to an outrageously difficult paper, but rather points to a woeful lack of quality of student intake,” said Tejinder Kaur, Principal Secretary, Technical Education and Vice-Chancellor, Punjab Technical University (PTU).

“If you can’t study maths, then you are a pseudo engineer. But then, people are obsessed with the idea of getting a degree,” Kaur added. Even after the liberal re-evaluation, only 183 of the total 16,000 passed the exam.

Perceived as a bulwark of professional education in the region, the PTU was founded in 1997. Today, it is the affiliating authority to close to 30,000 engineers, 10,000 MBAs and numerous pharmacy and law students in the state. The big three of Indian software giants — Wipro, Infosys and TCS — have been prominent recruiters here.

Rakesh Verma, Director, IT Punjab, also an IIT alumnus, said: “You could argue for drastic measures such as overhaul of the entire education system, but these are long drawn processes. In Punjab, we have identified this issue and are now placing a serious emphasis on development of human resources. We have tied up with lots of professional colleges and placement agencies and are coming up with programmes on skill enhancement.”

Those running private institutions say that the criticism is unfair. Ashok Mittal, of Lovely Professional University in Jalandhar, said, “Our governments have invested so much on setting up universities. Tell me how many Nobel laureates or creditable international researches have these universities produced?... Not everyone can get into IITs. This doesn’t mean they should be denied professional education. Instead of getting paranoid about private universities, the Government should place checks on the entry and ensure that people who set up institutions have the right infrastructure with them.”