Aspiring Minds, an Indian employability evaluation and certification company, recently published a National Programming Skills report as a result of a 60 minutes Automata test that was conducted across 500+ colleges in India. More than 36,800 students appeared for the test from different tiers of colleges.The report unveils that only 4.77% candidates were fit to take up the software development roles and only 2.21% out of 4.77% candidates can develop a logically correct algorithm with the best efficiency and least time-space complexity. Rest 2.51% can write codes but with some errors which cause some test cases to fail. The report also reveals that programming practice and programming ability are the areas of concern across various demographics, gender, tier of colleges and top 100 colleges. Only 25% females are able to write compilable codes and less than 1% can write logically and functionally correct codes. Furthermore, the quality of programming skills drops as you move down to the lower tier colleges.

This is not the first time a report has disclosed the skill gap and low employability among Indian engineering students. Last month, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) also reported that of eight lakh engineers who have graduated from technical institutions in the country, more than 60 percent remain unemployed.

To overcome this prominent skill gap there is a need of training intervention to improve the programming skills. The universities should put a greater emphasis to build programming skills among students in order to deploy real-time efficient codes. There is a need of immediate skill based education that will allow engineering students to have hands-on training to handle problems they are likely to encounter in future.

Meanwhile, Mohan Das Pai, Chairman of Manipal Global Education and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder, chairperson and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon slams the report published by Aspiring Minds on twitter.