India needs leader engineers not followers, Semiconductor expert turned faculty at IISc shares his views

Engineering education is a strategic foundation for the future of nation and so is also the electronics engineering education. The emerging market trends such as smart villages/cities, smart factory, e-farming and smart-everything need lot more technology innovation in electronics engineering. Not only market-wise, electronics is becoming important strategically too, both for the security of the nation and its digital infrastructure. Cybersecurity in our AADHAR powered digital-India systems including voting machines can be more trust-worthier using domestically designed and produced hardware and software components, more specifically semiconductor chips and operating system. For that to happen we need to build the complete electronics design and manufacturing eco and requires authentic innovative brains in this domain, not the copycats of what's already taken shape in other parts of the world. Electronics also has potential to create jobs in the skilled labour area. Irrespective of the automation happening in the smart factories you need smart people to operate them. That requires human resources of not only higher-educated but also skilled people who need to be innovative and smarter than the robot machines. India has a huge growing population in the age group of 10 to 20, who need to be taught leadership qualities to innovate smart solutions. This requires significant effor...