“Why Many Engineering Colleges in India Function More Like Coaching Centers Than True Campuses”
It’s probably still fresh in people’s minds, but let’s revisit it briefly. In February this year, Galgotias University sent a professor to the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi to showcase what she claimed was “Orion” — a robotic dog developed at the university’s Centre of Excellence. But social media quickly noticed something odd: the robot was actually a Unitree Go2, a commercially available Chinese product costing around $1,600. The fallout was swift. The government ordered Galgotias to vacate its pavilion, and its power supply was cut. As if that wasn’t enough, another exhibit at the same booth — a “drone soccer” system touted as India’s first — turned out to be strikingly similar to a product by South Korea’s Helsel Group. The university blamed the professor, claiming she “was not aware of the technical origins of the product and, in her enthusiasm at being on camera, gave factually incorrect information.” The incident quickly became a national embarrassment. Foreign media had a ready-made story, and for weeks, it overshadowed the genuine innovations at the summit. The irony? IIT Kanpur’s xTerra Robotics exhibited SVAN-M2, a robot dog developed over years of research by its students and faculty — authentic Indian innovation, right in the same room. But the bigger question is why so few people in India’s higher education system were surprised by the Galgotias fiasco. Yes, the episode was spectacular — a purchased product presented as indigenous innovation at a government-backed event — but the underlying problem is everyday business in many engineering colleges across India. India has over 3,000 AICTE-approved engineering colleges. The top tier — IITs, IISc, NITs, BITS Pilani, and a handful of strong state and private universities — produces fewer than 5% of engineering graduates. The remaining 90-odd percent come from private colleges affiliated with state universities, deemed universities, and standalone institutions scattered across Greater Noida, Pune, Tamil Nadu’s engineering belt, Telangana, and elsewhere. These colleges produce the majority of India’s engineers. The question is: are they truly educating students, or are they just venues where bright individuals mostly educate themselves while collecting a credential? In other words, are many of India’s “middling colleges” really just coaching centres with better furniture? It’s important to note that the “middling” category does include exceptions — institutions like VJTI, PSG Tech, and NIE Mysore punch above their weight through strong departments, active coding clubs, or individual faculty running real labs. But these are exceptions, surviving despite the system rather than because of it. The divide in India’s engineering landscape is stark. A 2023 Factly analysis of NIRF data found that 81% of faculty in the top 100 engineering institutions hold doctorates, compared to just 35% in the rest. A KPMG analysis of NIRF 2025 data confirms the trend: PhD-qualified faculty in top-100 colleges exceed 80%. The same analysis found that only one-third of all engineering colleges meet the AICTE-mandated faculty-student ratio of 1:20, and roughly 62% of research publications come from the top 100 institutions — leaving the remaining 3,000-plus colleges to share the rest. In short, the divide is clear: The Galgotias incident was extreme enough to make headlines, but for many students and educators, the underlying dynamics are ordinary and familiar. The question remains: how can India’s engineering education system ensure that the majority of colleges actually educate, rather than just certify, their students?