Benchmarking Civil Engineering Education in India

Abstract

The engineering discipline of civil engineering holds significance in many arenas of mankind like sustainable construction of buildings, infrastructure, water resources and environmental engineering. The statistical data on hazards, manmade or natural, the loss of life and property incurred, reflects ignorance and lack of quality control in construction. This justifies greater sensitivity of civil engineers and requirement of standardization of civil engineering education. Low entrance exam merits resulting in imposed stream, mushrooming private institutions with insufficient infrastructure, the quality of civil engineers being produced has degraded. This paper envisions a bridge between education imparted and the mandatory standards to be laid out at government level before anybody qualifies as a civil engineer. The recommendations include efforts to begin from 11th–12th grade with respect to subject awareness, required mental acumen, its future scope and career, syllabus standardization, benchmark problems, software with equal emphasis on basic education in all subjects and an exit mandatory exam like GATE. Equal emphasis will have to be laid on the teachers’ knowledge base as quality human resource is not available in remote areas. The paper suggests some benchmark problems of civil engineering which should be mandatorily known by students, and also the hands-on training of contemporary softwares to upskill their knowledge base. It will be useful to teachers while planning their lessons and the students in building up their confidence of the subject before they move to the industry.