|
|
|
Institutions | Training | Online Education | Papers / Articles
|
Civil Engineering Education In Making India A Knowledge Society
|
Conventionally the courses being taught to the students in the Civil Engineering branch currently have very high bias towards structural engineering. Structural engineering subjects take about 50 percent of total course load while the remaining 4 areas take 50 percent, all together. It is a paradox that most of the final year civil student's projects end up with design of different structures that have no relevance to current or near future needs of industry.
This is the major lacuna resulting in the lack of demand for civil engineering course. The specific developments in structural engineering have not increased the employment prospects and career growth of civil engineers during 80s and 90s. Even then, the biased course structure was never reviewed which ultimately lead to the present status of irrelevant and obsolete civil engineering education even in this decade of technology and thirst for knowledge society.
However most significantly the developments in space applications in terms of very high resolution remote sensing satellites, geographic information systems software and information technology, have lead to the emergence of new areas of disciplines, new challenges and enlarged requirements of civil engineering profession to cater to some of the following topics / tasks:
- Environmental management
- Transportation management
- Water Resource management
- Business and Services management
- Automated City and rural area road network map
- Applications in Urban infrastructure, waste management and comprehensive planning
- Property insurance and crisis management
- Disaster management
- Vehicle routing, tracking and mapping
- Agriculture / Forest management
- Topographical surveying
- Data simulation, visualization
- Real estate, banking, media, entertainment, tourism
- Electric power supply utilities planning
- Telecommunications etc
The above-mentioned topics / tasks of civil engineering profession are dependent on the specific knowledge of the following
- Spatial data acquisition and positioning
- Processing, analysis and display of spatial data
- Computational methods in geoinformatics
- Geomorphology
- Geodesy
- Data conversion
- Relational and object oriented Database management systems
- Large scale engineering surveys
- Advanced methods in digital Remote Sensing
- Integrated land and environmental information systems
- Digital photogrammetry
- Digital cartography
- Urban and regional planning using GIS
- Environmental impact assessment
- Information systems in transportation
- Spatial databases
- Assessing land value and land use
- Surveying using Global positioning systems
- Design of GPS network
- Fundamentals of electronics and communication systems
- Networking
- Web based GIS
- E commerce and GIS applications
Knowledge of the above topics is what the industry expects today from a Civil Engineer. This essentially revolves around creation of a Geo Spatial IT enabled Civil engineer. This is right direction for the paradigm shift that meets the requirements of society at large. The new millenium foresees emergence of a Geo Spatial IT enabled Civil engineer. This requires restructuring the present curriculum.
|
|
|