Preamble
The Indian system of engineering education has become vast. So far around 3000 engineering institutions have been established throughout the country. The exponential growth in Technical Education has however not translated into any significant growth in the number of quality graduates due to restricted availability of qualified faculty and better teaching-learning and training facilities.
There is currently a huge gap between quality and quantity in Technical Education. The World Bank took keen interest in systemic transformation of country’s technical education system to make it globally competitive and showed willingness to assist the Government of India to launch a Technical Education Improvement Programme (TEQIP) as a long term programme of 10-12 years and in three phases.
As per TEQIP design, each phase is required to be designed on the basis of lessons learnt from the implementation of an earlier phase. TEQIP-I started a reform process in 127 Institutions including 18 centrally funded institutions, 68 State funded institutions, 22 private unaided institutions and 19 Polytechnics spread across 13 States of India to participate in the first phase of TEQIP during 2003-09. The reform process needs to be sustained and scaled-up for embedding gains in the system and taking the transformation to a higher level. To continue the development activities initiated through TEQIP-I, a sequel Project is planned as TEQIP-II.