Let me take this opportunity to a share few of my thoughts on the global engineering education and employability scenario. According to a Nasscom estimate, the supply of IT Engineering graduates in India was 95,000 in 2003-04, in 2004-05 it was 100,000, and in 2005-206 it was 111,000.
Each year, we as a country produce, almost twice the number of engineers produced by the US and a little less than twice of all that Europe produces. A peek into the impetus given to education in our country indicates that the spending on education has grown five times in the last 50 years.
The challenge is not so much from other parts of the globe as it is from China. China is today the largest producer of engineering graduates in the world. So, will India overtake China over the next few years? “In my view, it may not be possible though, we are not far behind.
During our time, there were only a handful of institutes but now the number of institutes set up for various disciplines year on year indicates an engineering education boom in India. Engineering colleges in the country have been growing at 20 per cent a year. Further the quality of engineering education is also getting a boost.”
The paradox is that, despite the increase in the number of colleges, the competition for acquiring fresh talent every year is so heated that it gives an impression that resources are really scarce. In reality, there is a plethora of career options for engineers of current years. The challenge is not the supply of talent but that of talent that meets the needs of the corporate world. In other words, the challenge is that of employability !! It’s not about having a good curriculum or good faculty.
What then is the employability enigma?  We conducted a survey of all the stakeholders on the employability front to understand the mystery. The results indicate that if the students augment their skills in a few specific areas desired by the industry employability in the country can be significantly enhanced.
While India currently boasts of one of the world’s largest qualified pools of scientific and engineering manpower, the growing global demand for  industry-oriented professionals is gradually widening demand-supply gap.
Innovate
Innovation can help us to a large extent in handling the challenges of employability and engineering education. While innovation is ‘doing’ things differently, creativity is all about ‘thinking’ differently. Innovation is essentially the application of high creativity.
Innovation is personally very exciting for me and the most important differentiator for winning. I would want to summarize it with a couple of key points.
One, engineering educators and curriculum developers must anticipate dramatic changes in engineering practice and adapt their programs accordingly.
Two, we need innovative  ways to improve the training of engineers to prepare them for addressing the complex questions raised by emerging technologies.
Mission 10X is one of our quantum innovation projects. Quantum innovation starts with figuring out where you want to be.
It is about our aspirations and Mission 10X is one of our aspirational projects. Mission 10X aims at promoting systemic changes to current teaching-learning paradigms in engineering education in collaboration with the academia.
Source: Address by Premji , Chairman, Wipro at the launch of Mission 10X, in Bangalore.