If Gurugram were the exam, would India’s civil engineers pass?

Gurugram has once again become an unlikely examination hall for India’s civil engineers. Here there is no question paper, no prescribed syllabus, no marks for memorising formulas. Instead, there are flooded roads, stalled trafficstranded school buses and a city that struggles to keep functioning after heavy rain.

On August 24, intense rainfall left large parts of Gurugram waterlogged and traffic severely disrupted. The district administration quickly released an advisory asking offices to permit work from home and schools to move online the following day. On August 26, a section of road near IFFCO Chowk caved in after water reportedly washed away soil beneath it.

The easy conclusion is always that Gurugram needs better drains, but the more interesting question for India’s education and jobs ecosystem is – What are India’s civil engineering colleges actually preparing graduates to do?

We are discussing this today because India is producing civil engineering graduates at scale, the construction sector desperately needs engineers, and Civil Engineering is even making a comeback among top IIT aspirants.

INDIA HAS ENGINEERS BUT HOW MANY ARE PRACTISING?

There is a surprisingly basic gap in the way India talks about its engineering workforce. We know how many students enrol in engineering, we also know how many seats AICTE approves. We also have estimates of how many engineers the industry will need, but there is no single, authoritative national register that tells us exactly how many practising civil engineers India has today.

The available numbers all measure different things.

AICTE data shows that 1,72,936 students enrolled in B.Tech civil engineering in 2024-25. That makes civil engineering the third-largest major engineering discipline by enrolment after computer science and mechanical engineering.

Across all B.Tech branches, India recorded 12.53 lakh enrolments that year.

Then there is the workforce demand. A Knight Frank-RICS assessment estimated that 8,96,864 core skilled employees, including civil engineers, entered India’s construction sector between 2012 and 2021. It projected that about 17 lakh civil engineers could seek employment by FY2029-30, with an average annual addition of around 1.8 lakh.

And then comes the number that should make policymakers pause. Reuters, reporting on the same Knight Frank assessment, said only about half of graduating civil engineers were staying in the construction sector, as many struggled to meet industry requirements and found it easier to work elsewhere.

So, the problem is not simply that India doesn’t produce civil engineers, it is that a substantial proportion of those who study civil engineering do not necessarily become practising civil engineers, and the industry says the graduates who do enter it often need stronger skills.

THE DEGREE THAT DOESN’T GUARANTEE SKILL

This is where the debate around India’s engineering education needs to move beyond the usual argument about “bad engineers”. A four-year B.Tech can teach a student structural analysis, fluid mechanics, soil mechanics, surveying, transportation engineering, hydrology and environmental engineering. But real engineering asks different questions, such as, can you diagnose a problem when the variables are not given to you? Can you read a site? Can you interpret data? Can you work with contractors? So on and so forth.

That is the gap between having an engineering degree and being ready to practise engineering.

“The biggest gap we see is not that students don’t know engineering theory. It is that they don’t know how to apply it when the site doesn’t behave like the textbook,” says Aditya, a civil engineer working with Larsen and Toubro.

PERFECT CIVIL ENGINEERING CLASSROOM

We asked Professor Ashwin Majumdar, who teaches Civil Engineering at ITS Engineering college, what would be his model of teaching. This is what he says:

“Imagine taking a final-year civil engineering class to Gurugram after a cloudburst, giving these students the rainfall data, giving them the topography, also giving them drainage maps, providing them with land-use changes. Give them information about road construction and underground utilities.

Then ask them, Why did this road flood? Ask them to diagnose the problem, then design a solution.”

That single exercise, says Dr Majumdar, would test hydrology, surveying, drainage, materials, geospatial technology, data interpretation, construction knowledge, project management and problem-solving. It would also expose whether students understand how different parts of a city interact.

Another former IIT Delhi professor, Manjushree Patil agrees. “Civil engineering cannot be taught entirely through drawings and equations. Students need to encounter messy, real-world problems where there is no single correct answer,” she adds.

WHEN POLICY ENTERS THE STORY

Because students cannot acquire experience they are never given.

The question we need to ask is whether India’s engineering policies were still designed for an older India? Instead of focusing purely on the number of engineers that India produces, we need to ask what skills those engineers need, and are colleges being funded, regulated and incentivised to teach those skills?

That requires looking at everything from curriculum and faculty training to laboratories, internships, industry partnerships and accreditation. It also means measuring outcomes differently.

If an engineering college has 500 civil engineering students, the success metric cannot simply be how many of them graduate, it should include how many can actually perform core engineering work.

CIVIL ENGINEERING IS BACK…

In 2026, some of India’s top IITs saw a striking rise in demand for civil engineering. At IIT Bombay, civil engineering opened at AIR 385, compared with 2,666 the previous year. At IIT Delhi, the opening rank moved from 3,030 to 179. IIT Roorkee and IIT Bhubaneswar also saw stronger interest. The reasons are revealing.

India’s infrastructure expansion is creating employment opportunities. At the same time, AI is making students question the once-unquestioned assumption that computer science is the safest engineering career.

Bhushan Jamsandekar, an IIT Madras alumnus, said AI fears were pushing students towards core branches such as civil engineering, while civil graduates who learn AI tools could become even stronger.

IITDelhi civil engineering professor and former department head Deepika Choudhury offered another explanation. “Campus placements were very good this year across several disciplines, including civil, structural and environmental engineering,” she said. “There are fewer graduates, and opportunities are many due to major infrastructure growth in India.”

This is potentially a turning point for the discipline, but it also creates a responsibility. If India is attracting better students into civil engineering again, it cannot give them an outdated model of civil engineering education.

… BUT THE JOB ITSELF HAS CHANGED

The modern civil engineer increasingly needs exposure to BIM, GIS, digital surveying, drones, data analysis, project-management platforms and climate-resilient design. AI will not necessarily eliminate civil engineering jobs. But it will change what employers expect from civil engineers.

The engineer who knows how to use AI to analyse data, model alternatives or identify design problems will have an advantage over one whose education stopped at conventional drafting and textbook calculations.

That means policy has to move faster. “The question is no longer whether civil engineering students know the fundamentals. The question is whether they can combine those fundamentals with digital tools, data and real-world judgement,” says Ananya Kumari, a third-year student of Civil Engineering at Pune. This is where India’s curriculum and employment policies have to speak to each other.

The real question isn’t if Gurugram were the exam, would India’s civil engineers pass? Perhaps that is the wrong question.

Before examining the student, India needs to examine the question paper itself. Because Gurugram’s flooded roads are not simply testing the engineer, they are testing the system that trained, hired and empowered that engineer in the first place.

– Ends