Engineering as a career is accorded high regard all across India, seen by the country’s sizable and growing middle class as an escalator to economic prosperity. Its premier engineering institutes – the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) along with a dozen or so elite private institutes – are glorified and romanticized throughout the country.
The dream of becoming an engineer is passed on generationally and is spontaneously assumed to be the default career ambition for many middle-class students. Engineering entrance-exam preparation forms the bulk of India’s private coaching industry. The engineering test-coaching segment in India is estimated to be highly lucrative.
In spite of decades of implementation and reform of policy measures for facilitating the entry of students from socio-culturally underprivileged communities into colleges, the Indian engineering community is still overwhelmingly dominated by sāvarna (so-called upper-caste) males.
Leading positions in the industry and academia continue to be disproportionately occupied by upper-caste males. These power structures have reportedly manifested even in Silicon Valley, a testament to their persistence and perpetuation.
Most of Indian society has deeply entrenched systematic discrimination, bias, and a pertinacious tradition of exploitation on lines of caste and gender. Despite the provision of affirmative action in the form of categorical reservation of seats in engineering admissions, the various faultlines of socioeconomic inequality are still prominent.
Social mobility has remained laggard for most of the underprivileged and oppressed population and economic upliftment doesn’t seem to assure accompanying social upliftment even though social backwardness is strongly correlated with economic backwardness.
Structural inequalities tend to become latent and indirect when faced with reforms but persist perniciously, transforming to evade policy measures. Social stratification still lingers surreptitiously, largely unscathed.
Students from underprivileged backgrounds suffer from lack of awareness, mentorship, conditioning, connections and support networks, and access to premium coaching. Further, once they join colleges to pursue their engineering degrees, they face tacit, and in some cases even explicit, discrimination, neglect and ostracization by their peers.
At many elite engineering colleges, the toxic, stiff competition continuesm and with their limited resources and experience, underprivileged students face a vicious cycle of low baselines, slow progress, and high expectations. They suffer from deep-seated intensifying insecurities and develop anxieties regarding their status, identity, performance, deservingness, financial assurance, and confidence in their ability and potential.
This leads many to harbor low self-esteem, inferiority complex, impostor syndrome, and similar psychological setbacks. The vicious cycle intensifies as the factors feed back into one another, affecting their learning and mental health.
The dearth of faculty members from their communities only adds to this, maintaining a vicious cycle of discouragement.
Finally, when the students graduate and sit for placements to join various recruiters arriving on campus, the lack of any private-sector affirmative-action measures largely negates most of the disparity moderation yielded by categorical admission compensation.
Moreover, socioeconomic mobility for such students continues to be retarded by workplace discrimination, particularly in upskilling, community-building, referrals, recommendations, and promotion.
Every year, almost a million students take the Joint Entrance Examination – Main exam, the prime engineering entrance test in India, competing for some 50,000 seats in the government-funded IITs, NITs, and Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs). Those targeting IITs need to qualify for the next stage of the entrance exam, the JEE Advanced. Students toil to prepare for the examination, considered to be one of the most difficult undergraduate admission tests in the world.
With an expansive syllabus and challenging question problems involving complex reasoning and careful computation, the exam requires conceptual rigor, significant theoretical memorization, and calculation practice.
Most students start their preparation right at the beginning of high school and many drop a year in pursuit of the same, studying for up to several hours a day. The stress associated with the exam is such that numerous unfortunate incidents of self-harm and suicides are reported each year.
Many of those who qualify for the exam go on to express regret at missing out on their teenage days and enduring such mental and emotional strain in their formative years.
Indiscriminate imposition of engineering as a career pursuit and the relentless boom of coaching have been widely criticized by leading sociologists, psychologists, educators, scientists, business leaders, and other eminent personalities. However, the obsession for the exam persists, as India’s middle class continues to widen and aspire linearly, higher and higher.
Engineering entrance preparation in India is extremely arduous, and given the overwhelming all-around pressure of expectations of parents, relatives, teachers, coaches, friends, and society at large, students attach performance in the exam to judging their holistic worth and that of others, to an extent where one’s rank in the exam could for many years continue to be directly proportional to the regard one commands from them.
Determination of self-worth and derivation of a sense of achievement exclusively from exam performance during their formative years internalizes a meritocratic connection in the plastic, inexperienced minds of young aspirants. In the lack of exposure to diverse lived experiences and the presence of monotonic peer echo-chambers in study circles, this connection rapidly crystalizes.
The idea keeps getting reinforced with single-minded unidimensional academic progress, so much so that students begin to see their self-esteem and their respect for others as being contingent upon their respective success on conventional fronts such as career performance and later corporate performance – the only parameters of success known to them.
Given how cloistered and underexposed to others’ life-experiences and the harsh, ground realities of the world they are, most elite engineers live in a bubble of corporate comfort and narrow meritocratic worldview limited by convenient idealistic assumptions. They see a direct, simple correlation between success and merit, envisaging progress and prosperity to be driven solely by innate talent and/or indiscriminately-rewarding hard work.
The detachment from the larger social context that years of linear focus, armchair ardor, and narrow sense of progress afford leads to utter and persistent negligence of privilege and often to obliviousness to the very concept of privilege.
Upper-caste engineers are typically conditioned to think of the world as a fair competition, being largely unacquainted with the harsh struggles of the underprivileged and having a sense of labor omnia vincit (hard work triumphs over everything) ingrained in them. They find it difficult to visualize that different people have different starting lines in life and hence comparing their finishes with respect to a fixed finish-line is grossly unfair.
It is because of this very negligence of different sizes of our career pedestals that engineers tend to overlook the need for affirmative action and resist it vehemently. Many begin to see life the way they see the Joint Entrance Exam – a fair, universal opportunity that rewards merit and merit alone.
This oversimplistic normative idealistic thinking and general belief in the absoluteness of merit and it being exclusively a product of innate talent and hard work leads engineers to gloss over structural inequalities in society.
Engineers tend to hold a steadfast and often incorrigible conviction in absolute equality of opportunity as the ideal means of ensuring justice and fairness, instead of measures to ensure equity. This causes them instinctively to overlook great gaps in individual backgrounds.
Limited sociocultural exposure often confines them to unimodal thought and superficial analysis, which keeps them from seeing the need for unequal (differential) measures in order to level existent inequalities. This lack of awareness turns into a vicious cycle and they begin to view and criticize any attempts at affirmative action as discrimination.
As a result, among engineering students and engineers, we see a high prevalence of overt and tacit disapproval of affirmative-action measures as well as diversity and inclusion policies of companies ranging from recruitment criteria and promotion decisions to leave grants.
Hushed spiteful conversations criticizing reservation and belittling, even demeaning, speculations about category candidates who get selected for coveted positions are thus commonplace in university dormitories, by office water-coolers, and in online forums.
Apart from whispers alleging unjust preference being given to category candidates and denigrating remarks regarding their merit, casual and cathartic sexist and misogynistic remarks against female peers, often baselessly alleging gender-favoritism in academics and placements, are also reverberated in engineering campuses.
This misogynistic skepticism and aspersion-casting is in the same vein as the caste-supremacist resentment against reservation. Such derogation and calumny often continue through careers – the merit and achievements of women are played down by vaguely attributing their success to ulterior factors, often in a slanderous and disparaging manner.
Some of these views are motivated by a belief in essentialism, that is, the inherent superiority of males or sāvarnas. while others, though not explicitly supremacist, are dismissive of the presence of inequalities and systemic privilege disparities that justify contemporary affirmative action.
This phenomenon is ubiquitous, being reported everywhere from engineering academia to top corporate echelons. Such prejudices often manifest as cathartic posts and rants on social-media platforms, increasing the risk of echo-chamber effects for prospective, budding, and seasoned engineers alike who consume such content, ultimately impeding reform of the abject gender disparities in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
Meritocracy is glorified and affirmative action is bemoaned as injustice, without acknowledging the presence of privilege or persistence of structural inequalities.
The discussion above exposes the pitfalls of utilitarian education and the need for pervasive sensitization throughout the education system. In this context, the importance of the role of education in providing students with a broad unbiased worldview needs to be stressed.
Technical and professional education must remain grounded in its overall environmental context and remain mindful of social realities. Mainstream education, particularly profession-specific training, often suffers from a detachment from its real-world backdrop, an epistemic attention-blindness of sorts.
Incorporating diverse grassroots exposure, hands-on human-contextual experiential learning, and systematic community-specific sensitization programs could pave the way toward creating a more inclusive, empathetic, and vibrant engineering community in India.