In a scenario in which Karnataka’s 104 private engineering colleges are under fire for their relatively high tuition fees and for churning out industry-unready graduates who add to the huge and growing number of unemployed, the four-year-old Don Bosco Institute of Technology (DBIT) is lighting a new path for other engineering education institutions. Last month (May) 70 percent of DBIT’s first batch of 143 graduates received job offers from the nation’s top corporates such as Wipro, Infosys, Polaris Software, Oracle, Toyota Kirloskar, Torry Harris while the remainder pressed on for postgrad studies.

“Right from the start, our objective was to develop industry-ready engineers. Our curriculum was designed accordingly and includes business communication, supply-chain management, corporate etiquette, life skills, project and application management training. The proof that we have succeeded in attaining this objective is that leading corporates have hired our graduates,” says Byrasandra Bylappa, businessman educationist and chief trustee of Wayanamac Education Trust (WET), which promoted this impressive state-of-the-art engineering college sited in a green 36-acre campus replete with modern classrooms, laboratories, computer rooms and libraries at a project cost of Rs.50 crore in 2001.

A former mechanical engineer who worked in the Kirloskar Electric Company in design, production and sales before promoting his own enterprise “Prashanth Cylinders” in 1982, Bylappa has grown Prashanth Cylinders (P) Ltd (annual sales turnover: Rs.60 crore) into India’s premier and the world’s second largest manufacturer of high pressure arc welding equipment which finds application in the automotive and construction industries.

Bylappa’s transformation into a missionary of education began when on a business trip to Kolkata in 1990, he met the late Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity. “I experienced a compelling need to do something similar. When I sought Mother’s opinion, she advised me to help people through education. That’s when I resolved to promote a world-class engineering college,” recalls Bylappa.

Since then the Wyanamac Education Trust has expanded the ambit of its operations. Currently WET administers four institutions of higher education in Bangalore: DBIT, Don Bosco College of Sciences and Management, Don Bosco Institute of Bio Sciences and Don Bosco Pre University College, and has an aggregate enrollment of over 2,500 students. DBIT, which has 1,058 students instructed by a faculty of 94 including 20 Ph Ds, offers a four-year (eight semester) bachelor of engineering degree and two-year (four semester) Masters in business administration programme of the Visveswaraya Technological University, Belgaum. The average teacher-pupil ratio is 1:15.

Fully committed to fulfilling his education mission, Bylappa has drawn up an impressive expansion plan for DBIT. Soon the four-year-old college will introduce postgraduate programmes in mechanical engineering, computer science, initiate foreign language training for final year students, and will set up industry training centres on campus. “Whether in business, industry, education or any other endeavour, I benchmark my institutions with the best in the world. Therefore I have set my sights on getting DBIT ranked among the top 50 engineering institutions worldwide. I won’t spare any effort or investment required,” vows Bylappa.

Way to go!

Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore)

Training bounty

Contrary to popular belief, great education ideas can emanate from India’s dusty mofussil towns and villages. A case in point is the inspiring history of Ajit D. Nayak, a commerce graduate of a local college affiliated to Gujarat University, who began his career as an excise clerk in Mahindra Mills, Kalol, Gujarat. After a 17 year career (1978-95) of filling and filing the complex forms and documentation required by the nation’s nuisance-value bureaucracy, Nayak set himself up as a successful excise consultant in Kalol (pop.175,000), a small-scale industries hub 30 km north-west of Ahmedabad, the commerce and business capital of Gujarat (pop.50 million).

“One great weakness of the commerce curriculums of Indian universities is that they provide theoretical, textbook knowledge without equipping students with application skills. While practising as a consultant to over 20 factories in Kalol, I became aware of the acute shortage of clerical personnel who can complete excise, income, sales and professional tax and ESI Act forms, do computer accounting etc. Therefore in 1997, I registered the Bhumika Trust whose objective is to provide practical training in these areas to Plus Two and graduate students,” recalls Nayak.

Starting with a small batch of 15 students in the year 2000 in a 1,000 sq ft rented property, Kalol’s Bhumika Education Centre (BEC) currently trains 45 students and working professionals in three shifts to improve their on-the-job clerical skills. In the process the full-time faculty comprising retired clerical and administrative professionals has expanded to five, supplemented with a visiting faculty of five lawyers, business professionals and tax experts. Since the year 2000, BEC has placed 175 students in 164 firms in Kalol. Moreover recently a skills upgradation programme has been introduced for mid-career and working professionals.

Nayak attributes the success of BEC not only to the hands-on, practical content of its training programmes, but also to the flexibility of its tuition fees structure. Students are required to pay half the fee (Rs.10,000) for the part-time six month learning programme upon enrollment and the remaining half after securing employment.

Given the high level of satisfaction of employers with BEC alumni and responding to the growing demand for industry-ready clerical and admin personnel, Nayak proposes to inaugurate a BEC training centre in Ahmedabad next month (July). For this diversification project he has teamed up with lawyer and education consultant Hetal Lakhia (who also advises EducationWorld on business development in Gujarat). “There are a large number of educated unemployed in this state, who with a small dose of practical life skills training could transform into highly employable, industry-ready clerical professionals. I am confident that BEC, Ahmedabad will replicate the success of the Kalol experiment,” says Lakhia.

Dilip Thakore (Ahmedabad)

Remote learning activist

Sattelite based remote teaching and learning is the solution to last-mile connectivity and teacher shortages in rural India. That is what P. Kishore, managing director of the Chennai-based Everonn Systems India Ltd believes. In pursuit of his belief he has launched a technology-enabled learning programme named Zebra Kross. “The mission of Zebra Kross is to take quality education to deprived students in rural areas. An instructor in the Zebra Kross studio in Chennai, faces a camera linked to a server and reaches students across South India. The transmission time is just 1.5 seconds and students have the advantage of learning from live demos and video clippings displayed on the screen by expert instructors,” says Kishore.

Since the Zebra Kross teaching-learning programme was launched last November Everonn (annual sales: Rs.20 crore) has already inaugurated virtual classrooms in 32 engineering colleges across peninsular India with plans of wiring up classrooms of arts and science colleges ready for implementation. The curriculum content is created in its studio by hiring the best faculty from reputed educational institutions. Partnering institutions are obliged to invest Rs.1.5 lakh initially for setting up VSAT receiving facilities on their premises. “We will source best quality content from wherever it is available and transmit it to any part of the country where it is needed,” says Kishore, a mechanical engineering graduate of the Institute of Engineers who registered Everonn (formerly Everonn Systems International) as a public limited company in 2000.

Starting with providing computer education to schools in Ooty, Everonn scaled up its activities to include private schools in Kerala and Chennai. It has also joined hands with several state governments in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Andhra Pradesh, Nagaland and Jammu and Kashmir to build and operate computer labs in government schools. “Currently, Everonn provides computer training to 900 government schools countrywide on a build-own-operate-transfer (BOOT) model. Our target is 2,000 schools by next year,” says Kishore.

The encouraging response of schools to IT training led Everonn to foray into remote learning initiatives in 2002 by tying up with Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd (HECL), to become their lead partner for establishing Direcway Global Education centres in south India for business management education.

Right now Kishore is fired up by the huge potential of Zebra Kross, which he believes can transform village India by helping students, professionals and housewives acquire income generating skills. “We plan to have 5,000 Zebra Kross centres within two years. To replicate this model and increase our reach, we are inviting business partners to set up virtual classroom centres. Our vision is to support a culture of life-long learning and we aim to touch 5,0000,000 students by 2010,” says Kishore.

Which perhaps is one way to bridge the rural-urban education divide.

Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)

New AICTE chief

Faculty development is the top priority of Prof. Damodar Acharya, the newly appointed chairman of the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) which licences and supervises education dispensed in 1,265 engineering colleges, 958 B-schools, 1,034 MCA (Master of computer application) institutions, 320 pharmacy, 49 hotel management and 107 architecture colleges with an aggregate annual intake of 800,000 students countrywide. “Unless institutions develop good and efficient faculty, we can’t progress in achieving the objectives of technical education in the country. So all our action plans and energy will be centred around faculty development in technical institutions,” says Acharya an alumnus of REC Rourkela and IIT-Kharagpur. Hitherto Acharya was vice-chancellor of Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT), Rourkela (2003-05) where he engineered its technical university system with 109 affiliated and constituent colleges besides introducing flexible curricula and syllabi fine-tuned to GATS requirements.

Earlier while teaching at IIT-Kharagpur (1976-2002) he introduced similar innovations in the B.Tech programme in industrial engineering and helped the newly inaugurated Vinod Gupta School of Management of IIT-Kh to build a national reputation.

Acharya’s association with AICTE is not entirely novel. He served as a member of its eastern regional committee, undergrad engineering education review committee, and on its board of undergrad studies while concurrently discharging his duties as vice-chancellor of BPUT. Despite this he regards himself an outsider. “I am still getting acquainted with the council, its operations and structure,” he says. But he is aware of the widespread criticism of the council and its less than perfect reputation. “Let’s forget the past. We’ll start afresh and make AICTE vibrant and effective,” he says.

In particular Acharya is an aggressive proponent of greater industry-academia cooperation. In IIT-Kh he was instrumental in increasing the institute’s sponsored research and industrial consultancy (SRIC) revenue from a modest Rs.2 crore in the early 1990s to Rs.18 crore in 2002. Moreover he filed 40 patent registration applications for members of IIT-Kh’s faculty. “You can expect AICTE to encourage technical institutes to become active in the areas of SRIC and intellectual property rights,” he says.

Looking forward to his three-year tenure as chairman of AICTE which began on May 16 this year, Acharya believes that the country has no choice but to upgrade its technical and professional education if it is to attain the projected 8 percent per year GDP growth rate. And he expects AICTE to lead the reformation charge.

Autar Nehru (Delhi)

Also read: 50 leaders re-shaping Indian education

One-woman army

President of Helpers of the Handicapped, a Kolhapur-based NGO which runs two integrated schools for the disabled, she is a sportswoman par excellence (javelin throw, wheelchair racing, shotput, discus and table tennis), writes a weekly column for a Marathi language daily and is author of Naseema: The Incredible Story presented to President Abdul Kalam recently.

That’s Naseema Hurzuk, a wheelchair-bound paraplegic and disabled rights activist. A political science graduate of Kolhapur University, Hurzuk, an erstwhile Mumbai-based employee of the customs and excise department, tragically lost the use of both her legs when she was barely 16 years of age.

Her personal history following crippling infirmity is recorded in Naseema: The Incredible Story, translated from Marathi by Asha Deodhar and published by the Viveka Foundation. It details her social ostracism, her fight with disability, her pain and poignantly records her feelings as she plumbed the depths of suicidal despair and depression, to acceptance of her infirmity and subsequent conquest of it.

Pervasive indifference of Indian society to disabled people toughened her and she resolved to help the disabled to take on the world on their own terms. Hurzuk raised funds, obtained governmental clearances from notoriously bureaucratic government departments and built a hostel-cum-rehab centre christened Helpers in Kolhapur in 1976. Today, the centre is a haven for rehabilitation of the differently-abled.

The hostel’s 120 residents are encouraged to become self-reliant and productive through training in a repertoire of vocational skills. Besides running two schools- Samarth Vidya Mandir and Anand Vidyalaya in the Konkan region- helpers also undertakes sporadic projects for empowerment of the disabled. One such project is Dilasa, a residence-cum-rehab centre for the mentally challenged and severely handicapped. As if all this isn’t enough, Hurzuk is also supervising the construction of Swapna Nagri, an employment centre for the disabled which will undertake farming, including a coconut plantation, and food processing operations. Employing about 120 people in her own institutions, apart from those who have received training and are employed in private or government establishments, Hurzuk claims that over 10,000 people have benefitted from training at Helpers.

However, Hurzuk is bitter that apart from sustained media attention and the largesse of a few impassioned souls, little provision has been made by Central or state governments for the over 40 million citizens suffering disability. “There’s no holistic, sustainable, government-funded programme to mainstream and integrate differently-abled people into society,” says Hurzuk. “But as we unite and organise we will demonstrate to the government and society that people with disability can become useful, productive, tax-paying members of society,” she promises.

May the force be with you.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)