Contrary to the growing Western perception of the country as a technology powerhouse, the quality of Indian graduate education in critical technology fields lags significantly behind the United States and Europe. Concerns about the caliber of India’s legions of engineering graduates have mired New Delhi’s bid for full membership in the Washington Accord, which governs international recognition of foreign engineering degrees. Moreover, the country manages to produce a remarkably small number of PhDs in computer science each year. Indeed, Israel graduates approximately the same number as India despite the gargantuan population disparity. A senior government official in New Delhi a few years back acknowledged that India would never become a great power on the basis of such paltry numbers.
A parade of government officials and corporate leaders has acknowledged the serious disrepair of the Indian university system, including at the most elite schools. Incredibly, given the country’s high-tech image, the Infosys Science Foundation in 2009 was unable to find a worthy recipient for its inaugural prize honoring an Indian researcher in the field of engineering and computer science. And The Journal of the ACM, the world’s leading journal in the computer science field, for a number of years was unable to publish Indian submissions on quality grounds. Full story
