Computer Science and Engineering Education In India
India has emerged as one of the top destinations worldwide for engineering education. There are 6000+ higher educational institutions in engineering education with over 3 million enrolments as per the statutory body regulating engineering education in India, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Over 50% of this is in computer science & engineering and related branches such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Information Technology (IT), Information Science, Data Science, Software Engineering, and Cyber Security. In recent times, we are also seeing a trend in which engineering colleges are adding more seats and branches in computer science & engineering and closing core engineering branches. More than 10% of engineering colleges in India are in the state of Tamil Nadu. The state of Tamil Nadu is also one of the leaders nationally in higher education with Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) touching 50% while the national average close to 30%.
This flourishing of engineering colleges, especially with majority of them increasing only computer science & engineering undergraduate enrolments, has brought about its share of concerns and challenges such as employability. As per the World Economic Forum (WEF) Report, the unemployment rate in India in 2023 is 9% for those with engineering and other professional qualifications. One of the key reasons for this is employability skills gap. The India Skills Report 2025 is a report providing insights on employability in India with the participation of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Association of Indian Universities (AIU), AICTE, Google and Wheebox. As per this report, employability rate with respect to engineering education is 70% which is much better than other disciplines. However, this is a cause of concern, considering the fact that 30% of engineering graduates from universities and colleges in India are not employable. These numbers are also disturbing considering the overall numbers, which are close to half a million engineering graduates in India and more than half of these are in computer science & engineering and related disciplines.
So how do we do address this?
A wide variety of 21st century skills is needed for preparing the next-generation engineers. These include Data Science and Analytics, AI & Machine Learning (ML), IoT & sensors, cloud & virtualization, Cybersecurity as well as life skills and humancentric abilities like leadership, collaboration, empathy, communication, ethics, and cognitive skills. Initiatives such as hackathons, activity-based learning, and experiential learning programs can help in this context. Hackathons, and competitive coding contests like International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) can be highly effective to improve employability of computer science students, who make up over 50% of the total engineering student population in India.
COMPETITIVE CODING
Competitive coding is the regular practice of programming to devise problem solutions in a competitive ambience in which the programmer is pitted against other programmers, who are also working on the same things. Also called competitive programming, the coder competitors are rated based on several factors, which include efficiency and accuracy of the code and the time taken for developing the program and its execution time. Competitive programmers are also known as sports programmers. This is highly recognized by IT majors like Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Linked-in and these companies keep track of these competitions and the outstanding participants. Typically, in these competitions, an assortment of problems based on logic or mathematics is administered to contestants. These contestants could be from anything to two to several thousands and their mandate is to write and execute programs to solve these problems. Typical such tasks belong to data structures & algorithms, machine learning, data science, combinatorics, number theory, graph theory and cryptosystems. Competitive coding platforms can have machine and/or human judging. Platforms such as CodeChef, HackerRank & HackerEarth and contests such as TopCoder, Facebook Hacker Cup and International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) are activities promoting competitive coding.
ICPC
ICPC is a premium competitive programming event considered as the Olympics & World Championships of Collegiate Programming with annual participation of 70,000+ students in 3400+ universities in 100+ countries spread across 6 continents. ICPC happens every year in a 3-tiered format as a coding competition with university or college-level contests, regional contests also called semi-finals and world finals where the world champion is decided.
Coordinated by Baylor University, ICPC operates under the auspices of the ICPC Foundation. From 1977 to 2017, ICPC was held under the auspices of the international computer science professional body, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was referred to as ACM-ICPC with funding globally from IBM. Typically, the team size is three and contest timeframe is 5 hours. For any given contest, between 8 to 15 problems are given, which require the participants to leverage their creativity, teamwork, collaboration, design skills, innovation, and knowledge of data structures & algorithms working under pressure. Solutions can be developed in C, C++, Java, or Python. The problems are giving with multiple constraints and challenges. Test data is provided but no requirement specifications are provided for the problem, and participants are required to solve more problems in a smaller number of iterations and least cumulative time. Normally, participants do not have access to the acceptance criteria of the judges.
The 400,000+ ICPC alumni are top-notch and high-tech software developers, data scientists, cyber specialists, start-up founders, tech leads and project managers in leading companies. Noteworthy alumni include Adam D’Angelo, the former CTO of Facebook, and the Founder of Quora; Nikolai Durov, the former CTO of VK & CTO of Telegram and Craig Silverstein, the first employee of Google.
Since 2005, AMRITA Vishwa Vidyapeetham has been hosting the ICPC Asia-Pacific regional contest. ICPC Asia-Amritapuri regional contest of AMRITA is the largest site of ICPC world-wide with 7000+ participants. AMRITA has been responsible for popularizing ICPC in India from a few hundred participants from top engineering institutions like IIT in 2005, to these present-day numbers. These have benefitted the student community in India especially computer science and engineering students in getting placed in dream companies like Apple, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM etc. as also dive into entrepreneurship and high-tech start-ups. With tens of thousands of ICPC alumni in India, we observe a correlation in several of them securing high-paying dream jobs and international placements. Students having experience in competitive programming shows employers that they can work in a team, solve complicated problems, work in stressful situations, manage time and deadlines and minimize errors. It also gives pointers on the student being a disciplined, focused, and fast, which are all indispensable skills. Another platform that has contributed to the popularizing of ICPC in India is CodeChef. CodeChef is an online programming platform with a subscriber base of two million, promoted by the start-ups, Directi and Unacademy. CodeChef started a ‘Go for Gold’ initiative for ICPC contestants in India, which has now expanded with support from Newton School of Technology. Go for Gold gives huge incentives, travel grants and prizes to top-ranking Indian teams in the ICPC world finals. Despite the contest popularity, an Indian team is yet to win the ICPC world finals. If an Indian team aces the world finals, they are entitled to whopping prize money of millions of Indian Rupees provided in addition to the ICPC prize money.
About the Author
Dr. Prashant R. Nair, Head, Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, has over twenty-four years of academic and administrative experience in computer science & engineering department of the university. He has taught in academic programs in the USA and Europe at University of California, San Diego; Sofia University, Bulgaria and University of Trento, Italy as an Erasmus fellow. He has written six books, two edited books, one book chapter and over fifty publications in reputed journals, books, and conferences. He is active as a science writer & columnist. He has been serving as the Chairman/Vice-Chairman/Coordinator of Amrita University’s Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) since 2009. He has coordinated 3 cycles of NAAC accreditation, 2 cycles of NBA Accreditation, NIRF rankings, Swachh campus rankings and served as UGC nodal officer for university with achievements such as A++ grade by NAAC, top private university in India in both national and international university rankings.?A very sought after speaker, by conservative estimates has addressed 150,000 students and trained 15,000+ faculty on technology, innovation, professional bodies, and quality aspects of higher education in India, USA, Thailand, Russia, Italy, Bulgaria, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nepal, Bhutan etc. Awards & recognitions won include multiple CSI best faculty and academic excellence awards, IEEE Education Society global chapter achievement award, IETE fellowship, Fulbright program reviewer, etc. He has been involved in coordinating ICPC as site coordinator at Amrita’s Coimbatore campus for the last 10+ years. He is also an ACM eminent speaker.