As the country builds or upgrades over 68,000 km of national highways, more than 35 airports, two dozen of the biggest railway stations, countrywide freight corridors, a whole new hospitality and housing industry, it’s faced with a critical roadblock: an alarming dearth of civil engineers, the skilled professionals who are needed to put each building block in its precise place.

Industry experts estimate that India faces a shortage of over 70,000 civil engineers each year. Not surprising, when you have just one in ten IIT students opting for the civil engineering discipline and only 200 of the 1700 engineering colleges approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) offer the course.

All IITs taken together graduate barely 500-600 civil engineering students and estimates are that not more than a total of 10,000 civil engineers are created in India per year. In fact, between a third and a half of all civil engineering undergraduates either drop off that stream soon after college and take up the more lucrative IT sector. That explains why private engineering colleges have either been reducing civil engineering seats or just shutting down this department over the last few years.

How civil engineering lost the battle over the last two decades is a story of how bricks and mortar lost their glamour to clicks — the IT boom, fuelled by a growing army of footsoldiers in computer science and electronics reduced civil engineering to an “old economy” discipline.

With heftier pay packets and global opportunities offered by the IT industry, an entire generation of engineering students/aspirants switched over from traditional engineering disciplines to the newer ones. In this churning, civil engineering finally ended at the bottom of the student’s wishlist while computer science, biotechnology and electronics engineering raced up. Even those who would get civil engineering in an IIT, for example — based on their rank in the joint entrance examination — were dropping out if they got computers at a lesser-reputed college.

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