Engineering change with mother tongue
Sufiya Sayyad, 22, is the first from her village Belwadi, in Pune district's Indapur taluka, to become a computer engineer; she is in fact the first learner from her village. Her father Mahamad Sayyad is a farm labourer who brings home between ₹300- ₹400 on good days, while her mother is a homemaker. Her classmate Vaibhav Indure, 23, is the son of a farmer, Ganesh Indure, from Shahajanpur village, in Beed district. While Sufiya's parents took a loan of ₹4 lakh to put her through engineering college, Vaibhav joined his college's earn-and-learn scheme, which he says 'not only helped him make productive use of free hours but also earn an hourly pay' to fund his tuition.
Sufiya, Vaibhav and 64 others are the first batch of students, who having emerged from Marathi medium or semi-English medium state and zilla parishad schools, received their B.Tech degrees from the Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering (PCCOE) yesterday – their social advancement an academic milestone from the college's Computer Engineering (Regional Language) Department that tutored students in Marathi, marking a major achievement in the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
Forty of the 66 graduates have found tech jobs through campus placements, with salaries between ₹5 to 10 lakh per annum – 'way beyond our dreams,' said one -- dispelling all scepticism about the employability of regional language-trained engineers.
PCCOE was among 14 institutions across India to receive approval from the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) in 2021 to offer undergraduate engineering programmes in vernacular languages. It is the only institution in Maharashtra that was granted permission to initiate such a programme, to make technical education more inclusive.
How the programme started
'Before the programme formally began, we conducted a pilot project on diploma students, teaching them core engineering subjects in Marathi for two weeks. The initiative included assessments and feedback,' said Rachana Patil, head of the Computer Engineering (Regional Language) Department. 'Most students appreciated the effort and found it beneficial, although they requested that the core textbooks remain in English.'
Armed with insights from this pilot, the institute launched the B.Tech in Marathi programme in July 2021, admitting 66 students through the state's Centralized Entrance Test (CET) Cell – the cut off for the course was above 96 per cent that year, which has now gone up to 98 per cent. The first batch included 51 boys and 15 girls from 20 districts across Maharashtra (who had a rudimentary knowledge of English), reflecting the wide reach and demand for such an initiative. At least 50 students are first generation learners emerging from the state's tribal belts, such as Chandrapur, and tribal parts of Nashik, Buldhana and Akola.
'A dedicated team of nine faculty members was appointed to teach this batch, and a detailed curriculum delivery strategy was drawn up. Initially, the team aimed to translate the entire syllabus into Marathi, but due to technical limitations and terminological challenges, they adopted a blended approach,' said Patil.
Early challenges
The admissions were not without challenges either: as this was the first-ever regional language engineering course in the state, families feared their children might face discrimination and lack of opportunities in the job market. Counselling and assurance of industry interaction and internships integrated into the curriculum, quelled their doubts.
'Their faith has now been rewarded, evidenced by over 60 per cent placements in the first batch from well-known start-ups and established companies,' added Patil.
Sujata Kolhe, associate dean (academics), said offering conceptual clarity was key for the faculty. 'We realised that a full translation was not feasible due to the lack of equivalent terminology in Marathi for many technical terms. So, we decided to teach in Marathi while retaining the textbooks and core materials in English,' said Kolhe.
It fell upon the instructors to simplify complex subjects explaining them in the mother tongue, all the while encouraging students to refer to English textbooks for industry-standard knowledge. 'The dual-medium approach helped students gain a deeper understanding without being overwhelmed by language barriers,' she added.
Examinations were also conducted in a blended format, where students were allowed to write in both languages together. 'The endeavour was to offer them flexibility without compromising on academic rigour,' Kolhe added.
First stepping stone
Internships from the third year onwards allowed students hands-on experience about interactions in the real world, with mentors focussing on personality development, interview preparation and soft skills, helping students from the special batch gain confidence to compete with their English-speaking peers. 'We ensured they felt no less than any other B.Tech graduate,' shared an alumni volunteer.
Prajakta Maratkar, from Chandrapur district, shared her journey saying, 'My father is a state government employee; we are used to speaking and thinking in Marathi which filled me with anxiety when I went to college. But, over time, the faculty's support and teaching methods helped me, and others like me, not just survive but also succeed.'
Her classmate Gauri Nimje from Yavatmal district, echoed similar sentiments, 'I come from a family of small farmers; my primary goal was to get a good job to support my family financially. We were apprehensive initially about how we would be treated in the industry. But during internships and interviews, we realized that what mattered were was our skills, not the language we studied in.'
Prathamesh Theurkar, from Pimpri Chinchwad, who bagged the highest salary package of ₹10 lakh per annum, said, 'Studying in Marathi actually helped me grasp difficult concepts more easily. Equally helpful was the blend of languages in the exams and during interviews, as it allowed us to express our understanding clearly.'
Dr Govind Kulkarni, director of PCCOE, termed this endeavour 'a landmark event in the landscape of Indian technical education'.
'Today, as we witness our first batch of graduates with outstanding placement records and industry recognition, it reaffirms our belief that regional language can be a powerful medium for technical excellence,' he said.
Ashish Gawali, founder and CEO of ATX Labs, based in upscale Baner, Pune, said he was apprehensive when one of the students, Guruprasad Pathak, joined the company for an internship. 'We were curious how his background would amalgamate with a fast-paced tech environment. However, within weeks it became clear that he had both the technical depth and the right attitude we look for in our team members. Guruprasad quickly stood out with clarity of concepts, eagerness to learn, and ability to apply knowledge in practical product development. We gave him a key responsibility on one of our flagship products, and he handled it with professionalism, insight, and maturity well beyond his years. Naturally, when it was time to expand our team, hiring him full-time was an easy decision,' said Gawali.
Moment of pride
On Saturday, some of the parents gathered at the campus to celebrate their children's successes. A beaming Ganesh Sunderrav Indure, Vaibhav's father, said: 'He is the first in our family who has pursued degree-level education. He had the spark and we let him pursue his interest. All subsequent decisions were taken by him independently.'
Vaibhav, who was placed at Encora, an information technology (IT) company, said, 'Every hour I worked as part of the Earn and Learn scheme was a lifeline – it made me disciplined and every subject I studied brought me closer to my dream. My journey proves that with hard work and the right opportunities, anything is possible.'
Mahammad Sayyad, Sufiya's father, recalled how his daughter would study under a single dim light 'not ever complaining'. 'I work on someone else's land and barely earn enough to make ends meet. She made every rupee of the loan we took count,' he said.
'There were days when even affording a bus pass felt like a luxury, but I never let my circumstances define my future. Every semester I topped was a silent answer to every doubt and struggle we faced. Completing my engineering degree is not just my achievement, it's a victory for every girl in my village who dares to dream,' said Sufiya.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
13 hours ago
- Time of India
How NIAT is empowering universities to deliver NEP-aligned, industry-ready education
Rahul Attuluri, Co-founder & CEO of NxtWave & NIAT As India's education system advances under the vision of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, with the continued efforts of UGC and AICTE to promote quality and relevance in technical education, the NxtWave Institute of Advanced Technologies (NIAT) is playing a key role in bridging the gap between academia and industry expectations. Through its University Collaborations, NIAT is enabling UGC-approved universities across India to provide outcome-based learning, modern infrastructure, and deep industry alignment for their students, in full compliance with UGC and AICTE guidelines. The result is a new national benchmark for skill-based engineering education. 'At NIAT, we're strengthening universities,' said Rahul Attuluri, Co-founder & CEO of NxtWave & NIAT. 'Our role is to bring in everything the industry wants—hands-on skill training, practitioner-led faculty enablement, internships, and placements, while the university continues to own and deliver the core academic program.' The collaboration begins with curriculum insights. NIAT gathers and synthesises these insights from multiple sources such as its 3,000+ hiring partner companies, a community of over 10,000 tech professionals, and cutting-edge in-house R&D and product development. These combined insights are distilled into structured reports and whitepapers, highlighting real-time industry trends, evolving job roles, and skill gaps across domains like AI/ML, cybersecurity, and more. Universities receive these inputs at regular intervals, helping academic councils and boards of studies modernise the curriculum while staying fully aligned with UGC and AICTE regulations. Faculty upskilling is another cornerstone of the collaboration. NIAT runs industry-led certification programs for faculty, including case-based labs, hands-on code reviews, and access to sandboxed real-world projects. Universities also benefit from NIAT's network of 10,000+ tech professionals through the onboarding of Professors of Practice—seasoned professionals who co-deliver modules and mentor students. 'To become a globally competent professional, students need not only a degree but also the right skills and aptitude. This integrated program with NIAT delivers both. We're proud to offer such a transformative education,' said Dr. R.K. Jain, Vice Chancellor, Ajeenkya DY Patil University, Pune As a part of this collaboration, universities are leveraging AI enabled technology platforms offered by NIAT. When integrated into the University's infrastructure, this platform supports project-based learning, live assessments, and real-time feedback, giving students the kind of exposure previously reserved for top-tier industry bootcamps. 'Technical skills aligned with industry needs are essential for today's students. Our partnership with NIAT ensures they don't just graduate—they're prepared to thrive in their careers,' said Farhad Yanapoya, Pro-Chancellor, Yenepoya Deemed University Modern infrastructure is another focus. NIAT provides universities with a research-backed classroom design playbook, informed by benchmarking top world-class institutions, and adapted for the Indian context. The design includes high-speed Wi-Fi, ergonomic seating, smart AV systems, soundproofing, and collaborative layouts—all built to support tech-enabled, project-based learning. Implementation by universities is supported with detailed bill-of-quantities, vendor templates, and rollout roadmaps, ensuring academic institutions meet both AICTE norms and global standards. What truly sets this collaboration apart is its corporate connect. Through partnerships with 3000+ tech companies, NIAT facilitates structured internships, mock assessments, and placement sessions—aligned with actual industry hiring practices. Using data dashboards, every student's progress is tracked and supported, giving universities deeper insight into career readiness. 'Students today need more than just a degree—they need skills. Through this partnership, students will receive a degree from our university and an industry-ready certification from NIAT. This gives parents the confidence that their child is truly career-ready,' said Dr. Ch.V. Purushottam Reddy, Founder and Chancellor, Chaitanya Deemed University Students receive a UGC-approved degree from the university upon completing the university projects, assessments, courses, required credits, and an Industry Ready Certificate (IRC) from NIAT, based on their performance in skill tracks, projects, and assessments. This dual credential not only boosts their employability but also aligns perfectly with the UGC/AICTE vision of multidisciplinary, skill-based learning. 'From 2025-26, students at our campus will benefit from a holistic program—receiving a degree from Aurora University along with upskilling and industry certifications from NIAT. This collaboration empowers students with both academic credentials and real-world capabilities,' said Dr. Srilatha Chepure, Vice Chancellor, Aurora Deemed University Importantly, the fee structure is fully transparent. Students pay tuition directly to the university for academic services, and a separate, optional fee to NIAT for the Industry Readiness Program. There is no bundling or crossover, ensuring 100% compliance with UGC, AICTE norms. 'This is what the government wanted education to be. Government bodies like UGC/AICTE are bringing important reforms for change. Aligning with them, we've built collaborations that make that change real—inside classrooms, with universities, and for students who now have both a degree and a future they can count on,' concludes Rahul Attuluri.
United News of India
21 hours ago
- United News of India
Lakshadweep aims quality education, says Administrator Praful Patel
Kochi/Lakshadweep, Jun 2 (UNI) The current focus of the Union Territory of Lakshadweep is on ensuring quality infrastructure, teaching-learning materials, and ICT facilities in all schools of all the islands, Administrator Praful Patel has said. "Major initiatives undertaken by UTLA to enhance the quality of education include 100% conversion of classrooms into smart classrooms, provision of e-libraries, ICT labs, language labs, tele-education centers, sensor rooms, and virtual reality labs," the Administrator told UNI. On education sector, Praful Patel said "the literacy rate in the UT is 91.65% as per 2011 census. There are no dropouts in the schools. The Administration has provided universal access to school education by ensuring schools in all the islands." Further, as part of New Education Policy (NEP), Digital Literacy courses have been implemented from Grade 6 onwards. Under PM SHRI program eleven schools have been selected. Further, High speed internet facility have been provided in all classrooms, computer labs and libraries. The Laptop Scheme for college students has been implemented to enhance their access to digital resources and improve their academic and professional growth. Ekalavya Top Scorer Award is implemented to recognize the academic excellence, dedication and spirit of achievement of the students from class 3 to 12. The upgradation and creation aimed at improving school infrastructure in Minicoy, Androth and Kavaratti is currently in progress. A proposal has been submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs for the approval of construction of a Polytechnic college in Minicoy at an estimated cost of Rs 163.50 crores.
Indian Express
a day ago
- Indian Express
Remembering Eliza, one of the first chatbots: Lessons, warnings it holds for AI today
In 1966, at a lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum unveiled one of the first chatbots in history: Eliza. It ran on a computer that was among the most advanced at MIT at the time — the IBM 7090 — and could be accessed through a typewriter-like terminal. Eliza had different 'scripts' — or ways of interacting — and could mimic a math teacher, poetry teacher or a quiz master, among other things. But its most famous script was called DOCTOR, which emulated a therapist. Weizenbaum would later write about the anthropomorphisation of ELIZA, which, in his own words, led him to 'attach new importance to questions of the relationship between the individual and the computer'. Eventually, the myth-making around it reached such an extent that the tendency or pattern to attribute human qualities to computers came to be known as the ELIZA effect. The scientist too later spoke about the excessive reliance on computers, and would argue that no matter how impressive the machines seemed, what they pulled off could not amount to real understanding. These concerns, and the debates that followed, still matter today as we navigate a world with rapidly developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools. Weizenbaum was Jewish and fled Nazi Germany with his parents, arriving in the United States in the mid-1930s. In 1955, Weizenbaum was part of a team at American conglomerate General Electric that automated some key banking operations for the first time. He also developed a programming language called SLIP or 'Symmetric Lisp Processor'. This was part of an approach that worked with sentences, instead of numbers as computing had done until then. Weizenbaum was invited to join MIT's Project MAC, a Computer Science lab. Among other things, it was the first to build an interactive time-sharing system, where multiple users could use a single computer system simultaneously. Weizenbaum built ELIZA at the New England university between 1964-66. What Eliza did In the introduction to Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (1976), Weizenbaum breaks down how Eliza works in extremely simple terms. 'I composed a computer program with which one could converse in English. The human conversationalist partner would type his portion of the conversation on a typewriter connected to a computer, and the computer under control of my program, would analyse the message that had been transmitted to it, compose a response to it in English, and cause the response to be typed on the computer's typewriter,' Weizenbaum wrote. He explains that the program consisted of two steps: a language analyser and a script. A script, he describes, is a set of 'rules rather like those that might be given to an actor who is to use them to improvise around a certain theme. Thus, Eliza could be given a script to enable it to maintain a conversation — play a specific conversational rule.' Each time an audience member types something, ELIZA could examine it, looking for keywords that have entries in the currently active script. These words were then ranked and substituted, resulting in a response. One interaction of the DOCTOR script, which was that of a psychotherapist, was reproduced by Weizenbaum in a paper on ELIZA. It goes as following, with the text in all caps being ELIZA's responses: 'Men are all alike. IN WHAT WAY They're always bugging us about something or other. CAN YOU THINK (: A SPECIFIC EXAMPLE) Well, my boyfriend made me come here. YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HERE He says I am depressed much of the time. I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSED….' DOCTOR ended up becoming ELIZA in popular perception. A number of practicing psychiatrists seriously believed the DOCTOR script could grow into a nearly completely automatic form of psychotherapy, Weizenbaum wrote. 'If the method proves beneficial, then it would provide a therapeutic tool which can be made widely available to mental hospitals and psychiatric centers suffering a shortage of therapists,' one therapist wrote at the time. Weizenbaum also documents an incident with his secretary who started conversing with ELIZA in the DOCTOR script. 'After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room. Another time, I suggested I might rig the system so that I could examine all conversations anyone had had with it, say, overnight. I was promptly bombarded with accusations that what I proposed amounted to spying on people's most intimate thoughts; clear evidence that people were conversing with the computer as if it were a person…' Weizenbaum wrote that he had not realised that 'extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people'. Eliza reimagined With Computer Science evolving rapidly, the code that constituted ELIZA was never published and reproduced. And the original code was only discovered in 2021 among a stack of Weizenbaum's papers. It had to be copied by hand by Stanford professor Jeff Shrager who now works on a digital archival project of Eliza along with a team of multi-disciplinary academics across the world. What it means today It is critical in Computer Science history as it was the first to demonstrate the Turing test (how human-like a machine's responses are) of a machine replicating human language. Of course, it also set off the obsession with getting computers to talk and interact with us, leading us to this moment in history where we are able to generate personalised videos, images and text at the drop of a hat. Digital Humanities professor David Berry at the University of Sussex, who is part of the digital archiving project along with Shrager, tells The Indian Express that 'ELIZA is is a 420-line program written in an obscure programming language which is radically different from the LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, a gigantic system with billion of parameters'. 'Eliza can run on any computer today and consume hardly any electricity, whereas ChatGPT consumes vast quantities of power,' Berry said. The contemporary LLMs, which are powered by huge data centres, require 0.14 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, equal to powering 14 LED light bulbs for 1 hour, as per calculations by The Washington Post. Berry also talks about how ELIZA 'offered a crucial early warning about human susceptibility to computational deception'. He adds that 'examining ELIZA's source code helped to demonstrate that convincing human-computer interaction does not require genuine comprehension, rather, it can emerge from clever pattern matching and careful interface design that exploits human cognitive biases'. 'Even modern large language models, despite their impressive capabilities, fundamentally operate through statistical pattern recognition rather than genuine understanding,' Berry says.
