As artificial intelligence raises productivity and changes the skills employers demand, the old model of hiring large numbers of graduates and training them on the job is beginning to lose its relevance. The next phase of India’s technology story will therefore depend less on producing more engineers and more on transforming how they are taught, trained and assessed

India’s technology sector will cross $315 billion in revenue this financial year, growing at 6.1 per cent. Its workforce will grow at 2.3 per cent. Revenue and headcount, which moved together for three decades, have begun to separate, and that single divergence defines the task before our engineering colleges. India’s emergence as a global software powerhouse stands as a defining achievement of the last 25-30 years. The current transition towards AI represents the next phase of this unfolding developmental trajectory. Rather than a departure from our legacy, it challenges the same foresight that anchored the industry’s inception.

The industry that built modern Indian IT recruited graduates in bulk and trained them in-house, absorbing the distance between what colleges taught and what clients needed, forming a hand-holding safety net. It employs nearly six million people and carries a generation into the middle class. But that model depended on growth being linear in headcount. As AI raises output per engineer, firms will hire fewer people and expect far more of each one.

Capacity is not our constraint. The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) approved 15.98 lakh engineering seats this year, and enrolment is at an eight-year high. The constraint is capability: by the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology’s estimate, only about 16 per........

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