Every year on September 15, India marks National Engineering Day, honouring the birth anniversary of Sir M. Visvesvaraya, one of the country’s most celebrated engineers and statesmen. It’s usually an occasion for tributes and reflection. This year, we asked a slightly harder question to three people who spend their careers shaping how India trains its next generation of engineers: what does the job actually look like now, and is engineering education keeping up?

The answers, from Viraj Sagar Das, Pro Chancellor of BBD University and President of the BBD Group, Shriyance Jain, Vice President of COER University, and Dr. Loviraj Gupta, Pro Vice-Chancellor of LPU, cover a lot of the same ground but arrive there from different directions. Read together, they paint a fairly clear picture of an engineering profession that has quietly stopped being just about machines and structures.

From Problem-Solvers to Systems Thinkers

Ask any of the three how the role of an engineer has changed, and none of them reach for the word “technology” first.

Viraj Sagar Das, Pro Chancellor of BBD University and President of the BBD Group, points out that engineering used to be understood almost entirely through the lens of technical problem-solving and infrastructure work. That’s no longer sufficient. “Today, engineers are expected to solve far more complex problems at the intersection of technology, society, sustainability and business,” says Das, arguing that critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration and ethical decision-making now sit alongside technical skill rather than beneath it.

Shriyance Jain, Vice President of COER University, frames the same shift in almost identical terms, though he zeroes in on what engineers are now accountable for. Where engineers were once “primarily seen as technical problem-solvers, responsible for designing machines, structures, processes, and systems,” says Jain, they’re now expected to be “systems thinkers, innovators, collaborators, and responsible decision-makers who understand how technology interacts with society, the economy, and the environment.” His sharper line is that engineers have moved from building things to managing impacts, weighing a technology’s entire life cycle, materials, energy use, emissions, safety, maintenance and disposal, rather than just its initial design.

Dr. Loviraj Gupta, Pro Vice-Chancellor of LPU, comes at it from a slightly different history. He describes earlier engineers as people who largely implemented theorems and designs developed by scientists, translating scientific knowledge into applications across mechanical, civil, electrical or computer disciplines. What’s changed, in his view, is that those applications now demand far more attention to resource optimisation, whether natural, human or synthetic. An engineer today, says Dr. Gupta, needs domain expertise, an understanding of how that domain connects to other fields, and the ability to tie all of it back to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Rethinking What Gets Taught, and How

All three agree that engineering curricula can’t stay fixed while the field itself keeps moving, though each lands on a different emphasis for how that should happen.

Das argues the real shift needs to be in what students are taught to do, not just what they’re taught to know. “The emphasis needs to shift from teaching students only what to know towards teaching them how to learn, adapt and innovate continuously,” says Viraj Sagar Das, Pro Chancellor of BBD University and President of the BBD Group. He wants AI, automation, robotics, advanced materials and renewable energy woven into the learning environment itself, not bolted on as a standalone subject, and applied through projects, labs, internships and industry interaction. He’s also pushing to loosen the boundaries between engineering disciplines, since he expects the future to belong to professionals who can combine engineering with data science, sustainability, management and entrepreneurship.

Jain gets more specific about the mechanics of that shift. His recommendations include making AI and automation part of every engineering discipline, strengthening interdisciplinary education, and increasing experiential learning. But he pushes back on a common assumption that stronger AI tools mean fundamentals matter less. “When tools become more powerful, engineers need enough underlying understanding to know what problem to solve, which assumptions are reasonable, whether an AI-generated answer is correct, and what consequences follow from implementing it,” says Shriyance Jain, Vice President of COER University. In his view, the goal isn’t preparing students for today’s job titles, but for their ability to keep creating value once those job titles have changed or disappeared entirely.

Gupta takes the AI conversation a step further, arguing that literacy itself is being redefined. “Earlier, literacy was about language, then came maths, then came computer or computation-oriented literacy. But now, today, the world needs AI-literate people,” says Dr. Loviraj Gupta, Pro Vice-Chancellor of LPU, adding that this isn’t limited to engineers, professionals in finance, commerce and literature need it too. He’s equally focused on the ethical line around AI use, describing a thin boundary between using it judiciously and overusing it or applying it for purposes it wasn’t designed for. His more striking claim is about what happens after the technical skills are in place: he expects empathy and what he calls “social engineering” to become the deciding factor for who actually leads in the years ahead.

The Gap Between the Classroom and the Job

On where engineering education is currently falling short, there’s real overlap in what all three describe, even though they use different language for it.

Das identifies the core problem as distance, the gap between classroom learning and real-world problem-solving. Students often graduate with strong theoretical grounding but struggle to apply it in the uncertain, collaborative, fast-changing conditions employers actually operate in. His proposed fix isn’t to weaken academic fundamentals, but to layer stronger industry partnerships, internships, live projects, innovation labs and entrepreneurship programmes on top of them, alongside more direct interaction between industry professionals and faculty so curricula can evolve alongside changing workplace needs.

Jain describes essentially the same gap in slightly more clinical terms: students are trained to solve structured problems and often excel at theory, but struggle when it comes to practical application, while industry expects them to navigate ambiguity, work in teams, apply modern tools, and juggle cost, safety, sustainability and customer needs simultaneously. His prescription is fairly concrete: make project-based learning central rather than supplementary, bring industry directly into the curriculum, assess students through more than just examinations, normalise interdisciplinary teamwork, and teach modern engineering tools without dropping the fundamentals underneath them.

Gupta frames the gap most sharply of the three, reducing it to a single distinction: engineering education teaches students to solve numericals, while industry hands them situations. “They do not get numericals to solve from clients; they get situations,” says Dr. Loviraj Gupta, Pro Vice-Chancellor of LPU. “They craft problem statements out of those situations, and then the teams define multiple solutions and work together to build the most optimal solution.” His suggested fix is to gradually move engineering education away from pure numerical problem-solving and toward situation comprehension, problem extraction, and optimal solution-building, the same sequence, he argues, that actually plays out inside a company.

What They’re Actually Trying to Build

For all the overlap in diagnosis, each institution’s leader circles back to a distinct idea of what success looks like.

For Das, the goal at BBD University is producing graduates who can contribute meaningfully to society rather than simply respond to whatever the current job market happens to demand, professionals equipped for both employment and leadership, with the confidence to create opportunities rather than just fill them.

For Jain, the aim is graduates capable of creating value in a world where job descriptions themselves won’t stop changing, which is why COER’s emphasis sits on interdisciplinary teamwork and experiential learning rather than any single fixed skill set.

For Gupta, the endpoint is a generation of engineers fluent enough in AI, ethics, and cross-disciplinary thinking that social engineering, not any single technical discipline, becomes the real leadership skill of the next decade.

Three different universities, three fairly different starting points, but on National Engineering Day this year, the same underlying message keeps surfacing: the engineers India needs next aren’t defined by how well they can solve a numerical. They’re defined by how well they can read a situation nobody handed them a formula for.