To cater to the need for a technically qualified workforce, Indian policy-making organizations in the domain of technical education; focused on the quantitative growth of the Technical Education System (TES). The change, in turn, helped increase the availability of the technical workforce but soon became un-controlled; when the supply of the technical force increased continuously, the demand rate reduced. This demand-supply equilibrium shift resulted in unemployment and thus deterred students from persuading technical education. Therefore, almost 50% of the seats in technical institutes are vacant. Therefore, the growth story of Indian TES lacked sustainability and needed qualitative focus. Here, the authors have conducted a systematic literature review to understand the various attributes of sustainability of Indian TES and highlight the future agendas. Stakeholders' perception, Quality Management philosophy, Employability, Management leadership, and Role of accreditation were the key findings of this study having an impact of TES
TopIntroduction
In the 1980s, the need was realised to address the growing demand from industry for a technically qualified workforce. Thus the main focus of the Technical Education System (TES) was to address the gap between the demand and supply of personnel. This recognition of increased demand prompted the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to allow private Technical Education Institutes (TEI) entry. This move of allowing self-financed institutes in TES was also in response to the anticipated increase in demand for the technical workforce in the 1990s, fuelled by liberalisation. Until the beginning of the new millennium, there was fear that a shortage of high-quality, technically qualified personnel could prove detrimental to the globalisation of the Indian economy and eventually will lead to a loss of competitiveness of Indian industries in the global scenario.
In the past 35 years, the availability of undergraduate engineering seats has been on a continuous rise, with the latest number being 2.95 million per the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) report 2019 (“AICTE Report 2018-19,” 2019). These data are pretty assuring in terms of quantitative growth. The research has also shown that this growth has been helpful to the Indian industry to survive and succeed in liberalisation.
But, post-2000, it was observed that the continued addition of institutes soon resulted in the supply of technical workforce exceeding the demand. This excess supply resulted in large pools of unemployed technical graduates. These difficulties in getting jobs deterred students from joining technical education, thus, leaving almost 50% of seats unoccupied in technical education institutes across India (“AICTE Report 2018-19,” 2019). Researchers have termed this phenomenon the 'Boomerang Effect' (Upadhayay & Vrat, 2017). Combined with the deteriorating quality of education, this highlighted quantitative growth being unnatural and lacking sustainability (Payal Sharma & Pandher, 2018). Researchers said the declining quality was mainly due to privatisation (Viswanadhan, Rao, & Mukhopadhyay, 2005).
From the beginning of the 1990s, exponential growth was witnessed in the TES. However, the fall side of this growth story was evident towards the end of that decade. Researchers started addressing this concern post-millennium. Overseas, researchers like Kanji, Tambi, & Wallace (1999) studied the methods adopted to ensure the quality of higher education in the US and Malaysia, which further formed the backbone of studying quality issues in technical education institutes well. This paper is divided into eight significant subheads: introduction, objective, background, most discussed parameters affecting the quality sustainability of TES, findings from Systematic Literature Review (SLR), gaps identified and scope of future research, and conclusion.