MUMBAI: In a striking reversal of roles, campuses across India will send engineering faculty into factories, boardrooms and laboratories of the industries they prepare their students to join. For a full year, faculty will trade lectures for deadlines, syllabi for budgets, and the structured rhythms of academia for the relentless pace of the private sector. This AICTE industry internship isn’t just a handshake between academia and industry; it’s an immersion, designed to sharpen understanding and strengthen collaboration.
Professors will navigate the same pressures as the engineers they teach-long hours, tight budgets, and unyielding expectations. To support this transition, over and above their salary, All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) will offer them an honorarium of Rs 75,000 a month while the companies hosting them will provide a monthly stipend of Rs 25,000.
“This is an ambitious endeavour, a deliberate break from tradition, and it has full backing of AICTE’s executive committee. We are setting the stage for 300 faculty members-young, under 45, and eager to step beyond the lecture halls to take up real-world problem-solving inside a public limited company,” said AICTE vice-chairman Abhay Jere.
Draft guidelines with minute details are being designed, but important criteria include the standing of the companies that faculty can join and the fact that faculty who can apply will be mid- and senior-level teachers. “The fellowships will be of two kinds: 200 will work for an entire year and the remaining faculty can work for two stretches of six months each. We are experimenting with two models, to which industry and institutes can respond,” said Jere. A selection committee of AICTE will pick faculty who apply, industry will interview them, and if they are found suitable, they will be awarded the fellowship.
The scheme is rooted in a deep problem statement: On the one hand, colleges are complaining that industry is saying that students are not up to the mark. On the other, industry is claiming that faculty in our colleges are clueless about what is going on in industry and hence do not prepare students for real work-world challenges.