The Hindu : National : Microsoft official wants India to revamp curriculum

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 08, 2005

National

National

Microsoft official wants India to revamp curriculum

Special Correspondent

"India not yet a powerhouse for product development business"

India churns out only a "small percentage" of engineers in computer science It produces less than 50 PhDs in computer science Education system lacks the skill set for advanced engineering There will be no shift in innovation from U.S.

— PHOTO: K. Gopinathan

PAT FOR INDIA: Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology Dayanidhi Maran (centre) with Craig Mundie, CTO and Senior Vice-President for Advanced Strategies and Policies, Microsoft Corporation (left) and P. Anandan, MD, Microsoft Research India, Microsoft Corporation at the inauguration of the Microsoft Research India's new facility in Bangalore on Friday.

BANGALORE: India needs to re-orient its engineering curriculum to cover business-related aspects if it is to emerge as a much bigger force in the global information technology map, according to Craig Mundie, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice-President for Advanced Strategies and Policies, Microsoft Corporation.

Lauding India for its "spectacular" success in software services, Mr. Mundie, however, said it was yet to emerge as a powerhouse for product development business.

Blaming India's engineering education system for this lapse, he said the country churned out a relatively "small percentage" of engineers in computer science and called for a "balancing" of the curriculum to support product development activities too.

"Academic institutions ... should strive to make it attractive for students to graduate to computer science. This would require a shifting and balancing in the curriculum at the undergraduate level. That's going to be an area which would require very large investments," Mr. Mundie told a group of presspersons after the inauguration of `Scientia', Microsoft Research Laboratory's new facility here.

According to him, India now produced less than 50 PhDs in computer science, which was "less than one large computer science department in the U.S."

Policy initiatives

Stressing the need for India to have more trained graduates with orientation on the computer science front, Mr. Mundie said the education system lacked the skill set needed for advanced computer science engineering though it had built the expertise in other engineering fields. The policy planners need to take initiatives to overcome this lacuna.

Though, Indian software companies such as Infosys and Wipro had been imparting in-house training to a large number of graduates after hiring them from the campuses, this was not sufficient. "It is here that academic/engineering institutions could do much more," he said.

Discounting the threats of a shift in innovation from the U.S. to countries such as India and China, he said global companies like Microsoft that did two-third of their business outside the U.S. were enjoying the benefits of innovation, no matter wherever it happened. "We are not concerned about innovation shifting from the U.S. I still believe that the U.S. still has capabilities for innovation."

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National