mechanical engineering

education minister

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Students from the engineering department can in fact take up the repair and help fix the students’ bicycles. The focus of this project is social responsibility.” –S Suresh Kumar, Minister of Primary and Secondary education

Engineering colleges respond

Karnataka govt plans to askstudents to repair free cycles distributed by govt, saysLong before India was plagued by job losses and unemployment, engineers were feeling the pinch. Ten years ago, a McKinsey report had highlighted the problem and said only a quarter of the engineers that India produces are worthy of being hired. Last year, P Gurnani, CEO and MD of Tech Mahindra said that 94% of engineering graduates were not fit for hiring and the onus was falling on companies like his to retrain and reskill the engineers.However, there’s a small glimmer of hope for mechanical engineering students from Karnataka, all thanks to the Minister of Primary and Secondary education.The Minister, S Suresh Kumar, realising that the government-issue cycles to school students were being unused due to wear and tear, has decided to reach out to mechanical engineers-in-the-making from engineering colleges, to use their expertise to fix broken bikes.A mechanical engineering course with extra credits in being a cycle mechanic? It looks like the State government may just be able to bail the mechanical engineering students with some job opportunities. The State government of Karnataka shells out Rs 185 crores year on year to distribute free bicycles for Class 8 students in State-run schools. But soon, they found that the cycles were not being used by the students because of wear and tear of the cycles, parents use the cycles and students don’t bring them to schools. Now, to tackle problem of wear and tear of these cycles, the government is planning to give mechanical engineering students the responsibility to fix the cycles.This year the government earmarked 2,52,893 number of bicycles for girls and 2,61,692 number of cycles for boys, amounting to a total of 5,14,585 cycles.Despite giving these cycles free to the students, the government officials have noted that the students are hardly using these cycles regularly. Suresh Kumar said that he himself had observed that the students do not bring their cycles to school and that they were left behind at home.Suresh Kumar said, “Most of the times students say that the cycles are broken or there is some mechanical problem that they are facing due to which they cannot bring their cycles to school. Once we distribute the cycles, we don’t have anyone to monitor how they are being used by the students or if they’re being used at all. We need to bring in some kind of a monitoring mechanism.”To tackle this problem, Kumar said that he would work out a plan to take help from the nearest engineering colleges. He said, “We will see if there are any engineering colleges near the schools or if we can either cluster the colleges or the schools to allocate one engineering college to a particular cluster.The students from the engineering department can in fact take up the repair and help fix the students’ bicycles. The focus of this project is social responsibility.”Currently, the bicycles which are being distributed to the schools are tested by a firm in Ludhiana, Punjab. A senior official from the State Public Instructions department told BM, “We have a process of sampling. The Institute of Cycle and Sewing Machine in the State of Punjab does the sampling test where we check one out of 100 and one out of 2,500 bicycles which undergo a crash test to check their durability. The quality check is also done after the delivery.” Last year too, only after the cycles were tested were they released for distribution.Not just that, the State government has also requested the manufacturers to give a tool-kit to every student so that they can maintain the cycles.* Our students will be more than willing to work on the bicycles. We are teaching students to assemble and dismantle machines so this is a good exercise* Mechanical engineering students cut metals and work on such projects in their labs, so this will be an exciting project and we’re ready to send our students. We should encourage students to go to schools in rural areas and repair bikes* The government needs to give this to experts rather than to students. Mechanical engineering students will only have textbook knowledge* We first need to give real jobs to mechanical engineering students instead of giving them such tasks. The government should also think of how to fill up seats in mechanical engineering departments. This year, 8,000-plus seats were left vacant in mechanical engineering courses in the State