Quality over quantity: North leads south

CHENNAI: The quality of performance of professional graduates is higher in Delhi, Maharashtra and West Bengal than their counterparts in southern India, a survey has said.

However, the south Indian States have more number of engineering colleges, the survey conducted by MeritTrac Services on IT abilities of existing graduates revealed.

The survey sampled around 25,000 graduates in seven States - Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Kerala, Delhi, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu — and covered around 800 engineering colleges over a period of four months, from January to April 2005.

The survey said that 60 per cent of the engineering graduates take up IT/software related streams as their area of specialization.

"Every year India intakes around 3,50,000 engineering graduates, thus making the country the second largest talent pool of engineers across the world. There are over 1346 engineering institutions in India offering B.E., B.Tech courses and 920 institutions offering MCA courses in India," said MeritTrac director, Madan Padaki.

Over the last decade, the number of engineering colleges has grown at an average of 20 per cent each year and the output of engineering students is also increasing at about 20 per cent every year. The survey was conducted as part of the campus assessment tests for MeritTrac's clients.