Working Paper Series
Working Paper No. 7
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘IT Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
Carol Upadhya
August 2014
National Institute of Advanced Studies
Bangalore, India
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
University of Amsterdam
ENGINEERING MOBILITY?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration,
and the Commercialisation of Education
in Coastal Andhra
ProGlo Working Paper No. 7
Carol Upadhya
August 2014
Copyright: NIAS and AISSR
No part of the paper can be published, reprinted or reproduced in any form without permission.
Published by:
National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, and
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR)
Bibliographic information:
Upadhya, Carol. 2014. Engineering Mobility? The ‘IT Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the Commercialisation
of Education in Coastal Andhra. Provincial Globalisation Working Paper No. 7. Bangalore: National Institute of
Advanced Studies and Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research.
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Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration,
and the Commercialisation of Education in
Coastal Andhra
Carol Upadhya
Abstract
The region of Coastal Andhra Pradesh has been an important source of Indian software engineers, mainly
because of the dense concentration of private engineering colleges located there. The outward mobility
of educated youth, who work as IT professionals in different cities in India and abroad, has created a
pervasive social imaginary that equates an engineering degree, a software job, and migration (especially to
the US) with economic success and social prestige. Catering to and fuelling these widespread aspirations
is a burgeoning education industry, ranging from small ‘English-medium’ schools to expensive ‘corporate
colleges’. The paper argues that a regional culture of migration has profoundly shaped not only the
education sector but also popular social imaginaries and mobility strategies. These recent developments
are contextualised more broadly within Andhra’s colonial and postcolonial social history and a specific
regional formation of caste, class, and capital.
1
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
Acknowledgments
This paper is part of an ongoing study conducted by the author at the National Institute of Advanced
Studies, Bangalore under the Provincial Globalisation programme, funded by WOTRO. Earlier versions of
the paper were presented at the International Conference on Regional Towns and Migration: Interrogating
Transnationalism and Development in South Asia, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, October 10-11,
2013, and the workshop on Social Mobility and In/equality in Post-reform India jointly organised by the
Centre of Global South Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen and the Department of Sociology, at
Delhi University, November 7-8, 2013. I thank the conference and workshop participants, and my colleagues
and students in the Provincial Globalisation programme, for their inputs and feedback – especially Sanam
Roohi. I am also grateful to Dr. P. Srikant and Dr. S. Ananth for their contributions to my research, and
to Anju Christine Lingham for research assistance and editing.
2
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
Introduction
Travelling through the villages and towns of Coastal
Andhra, one is struck by the public visibility of
education.1 Signboards for schools and colleges appear
on almost every urban street and along rural roads. In
cities such as Guntur and Vijayawada, large, colourful
hoardings for educational institutions bearing
pictures of beaming young people compete with
advertisements for sari shops and bank loans, while
posters advertising ‘coaching classes’ for common
entrance tests cover the walls of buildings. Schools,
colleges and coaching centres even run advertisements
on television, showcasing the performance of their
best students in competitive examinations, and their
‘world-class’, expansive and well-equipped campuses.
Also crowding the visual field of public spaces in
coastal towns are advertisements for ‘education
consultants’ who help students get admissions in
foreign universities, as well as for classes in spoken
English and computer training courses.
The efflorescence of private, commercial educational
institutions and services in Coastal Andhra has
been a key element in a series of wider cultural
and economic shifts in the region since the 1990s,
particularly the intense pattern of out-migration by
educated youth driven by the demand for software
engineers within India and in the global market.
Catering to this demand, private colleges that
provide the coveted engineering degrees which
are supposed to provide an entree into the IT
(information technology) industry have sprouted up
across the region. Although the expansion in private
educational institutions is an India-wide trend, in
this region the phenomenon has been marked by
particular cultural and economic features linked to
the region’s social history as well as its position as a
major supplier of Indian software labour.
The starting point for this paper is the intense symbolic
value that is accorded to engineering degrees in the
public culture of Coastal Andhra. I examine the
pervasive social imaginary that was engendered by the
IT boom, centring on the figure of the successful USbased software engineer – an ‘IT dream’ (Nisbett 2009)
that impels families to devote substantial resources
to help their children gain the requisite degrees and
certificates. The rising global demand of software
labour since the 1990s provided a key avenue of social
as well as spatial mobility for engineering graduates.
With the movement of many young people to the
US and other countries via the IT route, an ‘IT craze’
swept the region, enhancing the desire for engineering
degrees and spurring the restructuring of education
all the way down to the primary level.
In the following sections, I attempt to unravel
the connections between the culture and political
economy of education, the pattern of mobility, the
transnationalisation of particular groups, and the intense
aspirations that are pinned to engineering degrees. The
formation of transnational networks connecting Coastal
Andhra with the Telugu diaspora, especially in the
USA, has also been a key factor in the transformation
of the education sector. Broadening the scope of the
argument, I locate these changes within the region’s
colonial and post-colonial social history and argue that
the commercialisation of education is a product of a
specific regional formation of caste, class, and capital.
Andhra’s Culture of Migration
The IT boom that began in India in the mid-1990s,
providing lucrative new employment opportunities
to engineering graduates, reinforced and augmented
the already popular demand for engineering degrees
in Coastal Andhra (as elsewhere in India).2 Because
the region was home to several private engineering
This paper draws on field research carried out by the author in Vijayawada and parts of Krishna and Guntur districts, between January 2012
and March 2014, totalling about twelve weeks, as well as internet and documentary research. The research included interviews with several
engineering college principals and teachers and groups of students, education consultants, local businessmen, journalists and academics, and
other key informants in the region.
1
2
The Coastal Andhra region, not an official administrative unit, is generally defined as the districts of Guntur, Krishna, and East and West
Godavari, and includes the agriculturally productive delta areas of the Krishna and Godavari rivers.
3
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
colleges, it became a key site for the production
of software engineers for the global as well as the
Indian IT labour market. Indeed, engineers from
Andhra comprise a major segment of India’s
mobile and ‘global’ IT workforce.3 Especially
during the ‘Y2K crisis’ of 1999-2000, engineering
graduates were quickly picked up by ‘bodyshops’
(Xiang 2007) or employment consultants, who
sent hundreds of young men (women entered the
profession in significant numbers only later) to
the US and other countries, mostly on temporary
contracts. The requirement for skilled programmers
at that time was so great that even people without
engineering degrees, who could acquire some basic
training in the required computer programming
languages, were able to land IT jobs abroad.
earlier movement of highly educated professionals
(especially doctors) from the region to the US,
UK, and other countries. This migration pattern,
which began in the 1970s or even earlier, was
an outfall of the investments made by rural
landowning and urban middle class and business
families in children’s education in earlier decades.
Consequently, a significant segment of the Telugu
diaspora in the West hails from this region; they
belong mainly to the dominant landowning castes,
especially the Kamma community, as well as upper
castes such as Brahmins. A consequence of this
flow is that Coastal Andhra has become deeply
transnationalised: most wealthy, middle class and
even relatively modest rural families have members
or relatives living abroad.5
As Xiang (2007) has documented in detail, the
bodyshopping business in Andhra Pradesh (AP)4
was centred in the state capital of Hyderabad,
where a dense conglomeration of private computer
training institutes, employment consultants,
visa agents, and related services clustered in the
Ameerpet locality. His study shows how these
networks reached deep into Coastal Andhra and
pulled engineering graduates into IT jobs through
kinship and caste connections, and stretched
outwards to the USA, Australia, UK, and Europe
through chains of (largely Telugu) placement
agents. Many Andhra software engineers moved
along the pathways formed by these chains, working
on contract jobs in various locations in order to gain
enough experience and contacts to achieve their
ultimate goal – to move to America. Many of these
‘techies’ were later able to find regular employment
and settle down permanently in the US or in major
Indian IT hubs such as Bangalore and Hyderabad.
The first generation of migrants mainly came
from affluent families that could afford the
high costs of education and migration, while
the second generation of IT migrants appear
to be more socially and economically diverse.
Due to the intense demand for IT labour during
the Y2K boom, people from more varied social
backgrounds were drawn into bodyshopping
networks, creating a pattern of social and
spatial mobility that became the focal point for
aspirations in the region. Although the majority
of software engineers probably still come from
propertied dominant caste families, a number of
young people from relatively modest economic
backgrounds, and from lower castes, have also
succeeded in getting IT jobs. The extent to which
the ‘IT craze’ has filtered down through various
social layers is illustrated by the frequently heard
(and possibly apocryphal) story of the relatively
uneducated village woman advising her son about
the programming languages currently in demand
(Chekuri and Muppidi 2003: 47-48). The wide
circulation of popular knowledge about computer
The wave of migration by engineers from Coastal
Andhra followed, and in some ways replicated, an
Because there are no official data on the social composition of the Indian IT workforce, or on US immigrants by place of origin (apart from
country), it is difficult to find a reliable estimate of the number of Telugu-origin software engineers in India or abroad. It is often claimed
that the largest proportion of software engineers are Telugus, which is probably an exaggeration, but the numbers are likely to be quite
significant.
3
In this paper, ‘Andhra Pradesh’ refers to the state prior to the bifurcation, which took place in May 2014.
4
The older generation of migrants from Coastal Andhra, consisting mainly of medical professionals who went abroad during the 1970s and
1980s, and their transnational ties with the region, are the subject of Sanam Roohi’s dissertation research under the Provincial Globalisation
programme (see Roohi 2013).
5
4
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
courses, which software companies are hiring, and
changes in visa regulations, point to the centrality
of IT in the mobility strategies of many Andhra
families.
The bodyshopping system went into decline
after the end of the Y2K crisis and as the Indian
software industry shifted from the provision of
on-site labour to the offshore model. However,
the demand for IT labour grew even more rapidly
after 2000 as India established its position as a
major global provider of software services, and in
Andhra Pradesh after Hyderabad (the state capital)
was transformed into an IT hub in the 1990s.
The former Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu,
determined to promote Hyderabad as a ‘global’
city and a software hub, spearheaded heavy public
and private investments in urban infrastructure – in
particular, by constructing an entire new area on
the outskirts of the city devoted to IT companies,
‘Cyberabad’. As Hyderabad grew and became
globalised, the city became a magnet for Andhra
regional capital as well as an important destination
for Andhra software engineers.6 From the late
1990s, thousands of engineering graduates from
the coastal region found software jobs in the city,
whence many moved on to other Indian cities or
abroad as they pursued their careers.
Although the growth of the Indian software industry
slowed down after 2008, IT jobs remain highly
desirable to students and their families in Coastal
Andhra, not only because of the high salaries they
offer but especially due to the possibility of migration
to the US. Because Indian IT companies mainly
hire engineering graduates, families invest heavily
in helping their children gain these degrees with the
expectation of substantial future returns. Accordingly,
engineering colleges advertise themselves mainly on
the strength of their ‘placements’,7 displaying on their
websites information about the number of students
hired from their campuses, particularly by software
companies.8 The jobs on offer are usually located in
major centres of the IT industry such as Hyderabad,
Bangalore, or Chennai, but once employed, a
software engineer may get an assignment outside
India (‘on-site’) and so a chance to settle down
abroad. The bodyshopping system also continues to
operate, albeit at a lower level, and it is still possible
for an ambitious engineer to move directly to the
US on an H1B visa if he can obtain an offer letter –
which may be provided by a relative or friend living
in America. This trend has further reinforced the high
value placed on engineering degrees in the region’s
public culture.
The desire to go abroad, or at least to move to other
cities in India to find well-paid employment in the
private or public sector, has reached such a pitch
that the younger generation of rural landowning
families seems to have virtually deserted the villages
of the core delta areas. Moving out of the village
to the town, and out of the region itself, is widely
regarded as a mark of success. Although Coastal
Andhra has produced substantial agrarian surpluses
and a wealthy business class with diversified
investments, it offers few employment opportunities
for educated young people; consequently, migration
is seen as the prime, or only, avenue for upward
economic mobility. A ‘culture of migration’ (Ali
2007; Kandel and Massey 2002)9 has emerged, in
which moving to America has become the default
setting for social aspirations. In contrast to other
migration-intensive regions such as Kerala, where
Kamat (2011) connects Hyderabad’s emergence as a centre of the global IT industry to the regional history of higher education and its
imbrication in particular caste-class alignments. Most educational institutions in and around Hyderabad are controlled by Andhra provincial
capital. Indeed, this was one of the political issues driving the student movement for a separate Telangana state, which was finally created in
early 2014.
7
Recruitment has been professionalised and regularised since the Y2K phase; engineering graduates now typically apply for IT jobs through
campus placement processes or employment agencies rather than bodyshops.
8
See, for example, information posted on the website of VR Siddhartha College, Vijayawada (a highly ranked college) on placements for the
2012-13 final year batch. They report 429 placements, the majority in major IT companies such as TCS and HCL. Students and their families
check these statistics carefully when choosing colleges. See: http://vrsiddhartha.ac.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=
548:placements-12-13&catid=1:latest-vrsec&Itemid=94. Accessed July 25, 2014.
9
The phrase ‘culture of migration’ is problematic if understood as a static set of practices and orientations that drive migration. Still, it is a
useful shorthand for the widespread aspirations for mobility that mark regions such as Coastal Andhra.
6
5
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
poverty, pressure on land, and the lack of local
employment opportunities have led to a pattern
of low-skilled ‘economic migration’, mainly to the
Gulf countries (Osella and Osella 2007; Zachariah,
Mathew, and Rajan 2001), in this case we find
mainly ‘aspirational’ migration from relatively
well-off families.10 Young people move out to
augment their educational qualifications or in search
of lucrative jobs, often with the ultimate aim of
settling down in America.11 Particularly amongst
status-conscious communities such as the Kammas,
transnational migration has become a key modality
of social and economic mobility, and young people
are often ‘pushed’ to migrate by their families.
According to an often heard mantra, the ultimate
marker of success for Coastal Andhra people is to
have ‘lands in Andhra, a house in Hyderabad, and
a job in America’ (Xiang 2007: 30).
Migration carries the promise not only of enhancing
a family’s wealth and property but also its symbolic
capital. Raghu, an education consultant, retailed a
comment that is frequently heard in coastal towns:
‘In Vijayawada, each and every house has someone
in America’. He explained: ‘It has become a trend
– I see my neighbour’s son has gone, so I also
want to send mine’. Clearly this applies mainly to
middle class and affluent families, and even within
that category may be an exaggeration; yet my field
research (and that of Sanam Roohi in Guntur)
does suggest that within these social categories
(and especially amongst Kammas), almost every
family in major coastal towns, and in many smaller
towns and villages as well, has at least one member
living abroad.
This migration history has led to the crystallisation
of a prominent Telugu diaspora, particularly in the
US, comprised mainly of software engineers but
also including the first generation of migrants,
mostly medical professionals. The social prestige
enjoyed by NRIs (Non-Resident Indians),12 and
their continuing involvement in the home region,
have reinforced the popular social imaginary in
which engineering degrees, software jobs and
emigration are regarded as key to economic success
and social prestige. Moreover, this pattern of
mobility has created a dense transnational social
field connecting Coastal Andhra with America and
other places, (especially within particular classes and
caste groups). These connections are materialised
through various kinds of transnational resource
flows, such as investments in real estate and support
for local development or welfare projects (Roohi
2013). These financial transactions, along with
periodic visits of NRIs from America who often
host lavish ceremonies in their home towns, have
also imparted significant visibility to their successful
mobility strategies.
The transnationalisation of Coastal Andhra is
reflected in the peculiar symbolic valence of the
category of NRI in this region. Across much of
India, the term until recently carried a negative
value, but in this case it appears that the NRI was
never an object of ridicule or derision. Instead,
NRIs – especially those who are ‘well settled’ in
America – are widely admired for their success
and affluence, and so have become role models
for local youth. The social value attached to the
sign of the NRI is reflected in its incorporation
into the names of several educational institutions
in Coastal Andhra, such as the NRI Institute of
Medical Sciences, Guntur and the NRI Institute
of Technology (NRIIT).13 While several of these
institutions have been set up by NRIs or with their
contributions, others have no actual connection
with NRIs. Instead, the term seems to signal quality,
There is also some amount of low-skilled labour migration from this region to the Gulf and Southeast Asia, which I do not discuss here.
10
This pattern also differs from the ‘middling migration’ of educated youth from Gujarat documented by Rutten and Verstappen (2012),
whose movements are often more circular and less directed, and frequently seem to lead to downward rather than upward mobility.
11
‘Non-Resident Indian’ is an official category designating Indian citizens living abroad. In this paper I follow the popular usage of the term
in the region to refer to anyone living abroad, regardless of their citizenship status.
12
Two institutions, supported by different groups of investors, use the name ‘NRIIT’ – one located near Vijayawada and the other near Guntur.
See http://www.nriacademy.in/, http://nrigroupofcolleges.com/nriit/, http://www.nriit.ac.in/, http://www.nriims.in/medicalcollege.htm.
13
6
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
just as the words ‘global’ or ‘international’ are used
in the names of elite schools to indicate a particular
orientation and promise. Here, ‘NRI’ represents the
successful ‘global citizen’ who brings ‘world class’
education and knowledge to India. The popular
desire for engineering degrees and IT jobs is driven
(at least in part) by the social imaginary that has
been constructed around the figure of the NRI.
Education As Mobility,
Education for Mobility
With the tightening of the IT job market and
the decline in bodyshopping, a second route to
migration has become common in the region
– going abroad for higher studies. Following
graduation, many students move to the US,
Australia, or the UK, mostly to pursue master’s
degrees in engineering, computer-related subjects,
or other employment-rich areas such as pharmacy.
According to ‘Raghu’, who runs an education
consultancy in Vijayawada, it is mostly engineering
students who apply for MS and other postgraduate
courses in America. He estimated that about 300
students go abroad each year from Vijayawada;
his agency alone sent 175 students to the US in
2013. According to him, the numbers would be
even higher from the larger cities of Hyderabad
and Visakhapatnam; however there are no official
data on the total number of students going
abroad according to their home state or district.
Raghu said that only one-quarter of applications
are accepted, which means that the ambition to
study abroad is much wider than the actual flow
of students. Most engineering college professors I
interviewed estimated that about 10 to 15 per cent
of engineering graduates from ‘good colleges’ in
the region go abroad for MS courses every year.
Education consultants sell their services by
promoting the desirability of a ‘global’ education.
Students too assert that they want to study abroad
in order to get ‘exposed to the latest technology’.
Raghu spoke enthusiastically about his students:
‘Everyone here is striving for perfection – they are
going out in quest of knowledge!’:
They want global exposure, they want experience,
more knowledge; they want to sharpen the
mind, to learn more things – that is why they go
out for advanced education ... It is not only for
money, not only for job. When they come back,
they will get a good job with a multinational
because they have an international education.
This will help them to settle down in life.
Upon probing, however, he acknowledged that for
most students the ultimate purpose of studying
abroad is to emigrate. Indeed, most students who
manage to get admission to master’s programmes
in the US later find jobs and settle down there.
According to an engineering college professor:
If you look at the M.Tech course content at
the IITs, it is same as what they are going [to
the US] for. There are plenty of M.Tech seats
here. Moreover, they get scholarships here. So
they are basically applying for these courses
abroad in order to migrate.
Studying abroad requires heavy investment on the
part of the student’s family, and sometimes even
family property is sold to fund such education.
Most students take education loans from banks,
but these generally cover only tuition fees and not
travel and living expenses. Raghu said:
Families here will invest any amount to get
their kids educated. They trust in education
– education gives you family background, it
gives you income ... They believe in education
because it is the only way to come up.
The long path to education migration begins much
before college with obtaining admission in a good
English-medium private school, which is then
followed by a pre-university course in one of the
expensive ‘corporate colleges’ (see below) and an
engineering degree from a highly ranked institution.
According to education consultants in Vijayawada,
the total cost of a two-year postgraduate degree in
the US is around $40,000-45,000, or about 20 to
25 lakh rupees (at the exchange rate that prevailed
7
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
before the sharp fall in the value of the rupee in
2013) – an investment affordable mainly by well-off
families. In addition, the application process costs
around Rs 100,000, including GRE and TOEFL
exams, application and visa fees, and so on – a large
sum for an effort that very often does not succeed.
However, the easy availability of education loans
has made a foreign degree more accessible than
earlier. According to a journalist in Vijayawada:
Now it is easy for middle class families to send
their children outside for studies because they can
get bank loans. Earlier a middle class family could
only dream of sending their child abroad – it was
too costly, they could not even think of it. But
now this dream is seen as achievable by ordinary
people – they have a passion to go outside.
Because their families make significant sacrifices to
fund their education abroad, most students do not
come back to India after completing their degrees
but instead take up jobs outside to pay off their
loans or contribute to their families’ assets. Parents
too expect their children to provide some return
on their investments in their education, once they
are ‘earning well’ (i.e., in dollars). This expectation
of reciprocity is materialised in substantial flows of
NRI money into property – agricultural land and
urban real estate – in the region.
Cultural Economy of
Education
The deep symbolic value vested in engineering
degrees in Andhra goes much beyond the access
that they may provide to an IT job, high earnings,
or the possibility of migrating to the US. Even
in earlier decades, the dowry that a young man
could command in the marriage market was
closely linked to his degree, with engineering and
medical graduates being among the most desirable
matches, after only IAS (government) officers
(Upadhya 1990). Of course, engineering has
long been a central element of the technological
imaginary of the postcolonial developmental state,
conferring a high social status on engineers within
8
the Indian middle classes. But in Coastal Andhra,
the distinctive symbolic valence that attaches to
engineering is perhaps more closely related to the
regional caste and class configuration that took
shape during the late colonial and early postcolonial
periods. This social formation was distinguished
by a productive agrarian economy closely tied to
regional market towns, the emergence of strong
caste identities in the early 20th century in tandem
with the crystallisation of a new regional elite, and
the consolidation of provincial capital.
The construction of dams on the Krishna and
Godavari rivers in the late 19th century, which
supplied water to an extensive network of irrigation
canals in the deltas, transformed Coastal Andhra
into a productive agricultural belt, producing
mainly paddy (rice) but also cash crops such as
sugar cane. Increased productivity, the extension
of cultivated area, commercialisation of agriculture,
and the development of dynamic markets for
agricultural produce, land and credit, created a class
of prosperous landowning cultivators who also
gradually diversified into other activities such as
trade and money-lending. The expansion of trade
and transport systems stimulated the growth of
large market towns, which became economic and
social centres for their rural hinterlands.
These developments led to the emergence of
a distinctive regional elite, consisting mainly of
members of the dominant landowning castes
(primarily Kammas but also Reddys, Rajus, Kapus,
Velamas, and Naidus), which had its base in rural
land and agriculture and a strong foothold in the
urban economy. From the 1930s, rural landowning
families began to invest agricultural surpluses in a
range of business activities in both rural and urban
areas, as well as in children’s education as a means
of upward mobility (Upadhya 1988). Large farmers
often sent their sons to study in high schools and
colleges of neighbouring towns, many of whom
later took up white collar professions and became
urban dwellers (Baker 1984; Washbrook 1973). As
the regional economy flourished and diversified,
provincial towns such as Vijayawada and Guntur
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
became centres not only of trade and finance
but also of education, drawing students from
rural areas. By the 1970s, especially following the
prosperity that the Green Revolution brought to
many farmers, most rural landed families had at
least one member living in a town or city, studying
or engaged in a non-agricultural occupation.
The movement out of the agrarian economy,
confined initially to the richest families, accelerated
from the 1990s. The result is that the younger
generation of most landowning households – even
small farmers – are hardly found in the core delta
villages today. This history of social mobility linked
to rural-urban migration has imparted a distinctive
shape to regional capital and to the regional dominant
class. These groups remain rooted in land and an
agrarian ethos even as they became committed to
‘modern’ life and merged into the urban middle
classes. For the elite as well as aspiring classes,
education became a central social value as well as
a key modality for the creation of value (Upadhya
1997). The culture of education that was crafted in
the early 20th century has permeated more widely
in Andhra society, partly accounting for recent
developments in engineering education discussed
below.
The strong interest in education in Andhra was
also linked to the rise of caste politics and the
consolidation of the major dominant castes into
region-wide social categories in the early 20th
century. The deep interest amongst the Kammas,
for example, in education was reflected in the
establishment of a number of schools, colleges
and student hostels by wealthy caste members
from the 1920s, often through family trusts that
continue to manage educational institutions in the
region even today. The many caste associations
that emerged during this period were primarily
engaged in promoting education within their
own communities (Choudary 1954). For example,
the Kammavari Sangham focused on providing
scholarships and hostel facilities ‘to the poor and
meritorious students of the Kamma community’
(quoted in Kamat, Mir and Mathew 2004: 10; no
citation given). It is noteworthy that the caste
associations of Kammas, Reddys, and other
dominant agricultural castes were formed not by
rural farmers but by educated caste members who
were government servants or lawyers living in
towns (Washbrook 1975).
Another element of Coastal Andhra’s socioeconomic configuration is a particular ‘culture of
business’ that emerged after the 1930s, and which
was strengthened by the Green Revolution of
the 1960s and 1970s (Ananth 2007). With rising
agrarian surpluses, large farmers began to diversify
their economic activities by investing agricultural
profits in small businesses such as rice mills and
cinema halls in their villages, or in agricultural
trade, finance, transport, construction contracting,
the liquor trade, and film production, in major
towns of the region and in Madras (Srinivas 2010,
2013; Upadhya 1988). The pattern of economic
diversification among Kammas goes back to the
1930s, pushed in part by their experiences during
the Depression and the desire to mitigate risk
(Ananth 2007: 118). A major consequence of this
trend is that the dominant business class in Coastal
Andhra came to consist mainly of members of the
landowning castes (especially Kammas) rather than
the ‘traditional’ trading community of Komatis
(or Vaisyas). The formation of ‘provincial capital’
that emerged in this region (Parthasarathy 2013)
thus has been deeply shaped by its base in land,
agriculture, and caste.
For this regional business class with diverse
economic and property interests and a strong
interest in education, it was perhaps inevitable
that education would become yet another lucrative
business opportunity. Investment in educational
institutions was particularly attractive to Kamma
landlords and businessmen because it could be
represented as a social service or philanthropic
gesture, thereby enhancing the social status of
the founders. From at least the 1970s, education
became a major avenue for the accumulation of
capital in Coastal Andhra. Against this background,
it comes as no surprise that the majority of
9
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
engineering colleges and education groups in the
region are owned and managed by local business
families, politicians, and other regional elites.
The Education Business
Under the Nehruvian planning regime, there were
very few engineering colleges in the country, all
of them government-run. Seats were scarce and
competition for admissions stiff, which meant that
engineering education was accessible mainly to the
children of the elites and middle classes who had
the requisite economic resources and educational
qualifications. To cater to the growing demand for
engineering degrees, the government gradually
began to loosen restrictions on the establishment
of private educational institutions as a means of
expanding access to higher education, thereby
creating a new avenue for investment.
The recent trend towards privatisation of higher
education is often attributed to ‘neoliberal’
economic and political reforms since the 1990s
(Chopra and Jeffery 2005; Kamat 2011). In AP, the
commercialisation of professional and technical
education also proceeded rapidly during this period.
However, the trajectory of commercial education
in Coastal Andhra must be contextualised within
the region’s longer social history, described above.
Andhra Pradesh was one of the first states (the
others were Karnataka and Maharashtra) where
private professional colleges were established
during the 1970s. The ‘capitation fee’ (which
refers to the large donation needed to gain
admission) phenomenon has been attributed to the
rising aspirations of the emerging non-Brahmin
elites of these states, where higher education
and professional occupations had long been
dominated by higher castes, especially Brahmins
(Kaul 1993). Dominant caste (landowning but
usually middle-ranked) groups such as Kunbis/
Marathas in Maharashtra, Kammas and Reddys in
Andhra Pradesh, and Vokkaligas and Lingayats in
Karnataka, began to set up educational institutions
as a means of accumulating the forms of cultural
capital that had been monopolised by Brahmins, and
to gain access to government jobs. The mobilisation
of resources through caste- and kinship-based
networks was crucial to the expansion of private
engineering and medical colleges during this period
(Kamat, Mir and Mathew 2004: 21, note 10).14
VR Siddhartha Engineering College, founded in
Vijayawada in 1977, was the first private technical
institution in Andhra Pradesh. Subsequently,
several private colleges were started in Hyderabad
and in other towns and rural areas of the state,
particularly in the coastal districts. Most of these
institutions were established by caste-based trusts,
which created the ‘educational societies’ that came
to dominate the technical education sector during
the 1980s (2004: 10).15 Many of these colleges
even today are identified with the caste groups
that established them. For example, institutions
such as VR and PVP Siddhartha Engineering
Colleges, Vijayawada, and Vignan University and
KL University in Guntur district, are commonly
referred to as ‘Kamma colleges’.16
Although private educational institutions set up
during the 1970s and 1980s were often inspired
by the ideals of social progress, public welfare,
and philanthropy, a close link between business
The authors connect the surge in the number of ‘donation paying colleges’ in the mid-1970s with the rise of the middle class following the
breakdown of the national coalition at the centre and the consequent resurgence of regional and caste politics (Kamat, Mir and Mathew
2004: 10).
14
15
An example is Koneru Lakshmaiah Charities, a trust set up in Vijayawada in 1980, which started the KL College of Engineering in Guntur
District in 1981. In 1996 the trust was converted into a society, the Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation. The college recently
achieved ‘deemed university’ status, making KL University one of three private universities in the state. The other two – Vignan and GITAM
Universities – have similar histories.
These institutions are listed as ‘Kammavari’ on caste-based websites. ‘Kamma’ medical colleges include NTR Health University,
Vijayawada, Dr. Pinnamaneni Siddartha Institute of Medical Sciences & Research, Gannavaram, and NRI Institute of Medical Sciences,
Visakhapatnam. See: http://kammasworld.blogspot.in/2011/01/kammavari-medical-collges-in-ap-and.html. Accessed September 27,
2013. ‘Kammavari’ engineering colleges include Gudlavalleru Engineering College and NRI Institute of Technology in Krishna District, and
Bapatla Engineering College and Tenali Engineering College in Guntur District, among others. http://www.kammavelugu.org/industry/
educatation-institutations/andhra-pradesh/. Accessed September 27, 2013.
16
10
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
interests and education was forged even at this
stage. Most of the older colleges have grown
into large groups of institutions, or ‘education
empires’, which include everything from nursery
and primary schools to intermediate colleges and
engineering and other professional institutes. Most
of these groups expanded organically over several
decades, usually starting out as an engineering
college funded by a family trust which then
branched out into other kinds of institutions.17
While most such groups were started as trusts
several decades ago, several prominent institutions
were founded more recently by successful
businessmen (or politicians) who converted
their wealth into symbolic capital by building
educational institutions. An example is GITAM
University in Visakhapatnam, which began life as
an engineering college established by a prominent
local entrepreneur and politician, M.V.V.S. Murthy.
A third type of education entrepreneur started
out running coaching centres. An example is
Dr. L. Rathaiah, head of the Vignan Foundation
for Science, Technology and Research, who
transformed his coaching centres into intermediate
colleges and later expanded his enterprise into a
diversified education group. The Vignan group,
with 40,000 students, includes fifteen schools, nine
junior colleges, one undergraduate/ postgraduate
college, an education college, three pharmacy
colleges, and eight engineering colleges, located
in towns across Coastal Andhra as well as in
Hyderabad.18
uncontrolled growth of private institutions and
the revelation of various malpractices by the
media in recent years, the state government began
to regulate private colleges by imposing rules
governing admissions, fee structures, facilities,
course content, and so on. Consequently, the
recent history of private education has been one
of contestation between the state and private
educational institutions, whose managements
have banded together into associations such as
the AP Private Engineering Colleges Management
Association that represent their interests vis-a-vis
regulatory bodies.
The convergence of education with regional
capital has meant that owners and managements
of educational institutions have become powerful
forces in the state, and a tight nexus has
been forged between politicians, government
agencies, and education entrepreneurs. With the
Sri Chaitanya makes lives of students better by
integrating preparatory coaching with regular
Board Syllabus. Students are prepared to study
in the best institutions across the country –
IIT, AFMC, NIT, AIIMS etc. in the fields
of Engineering and Medicine [...] Students
Another significant development in the
education sector has been the mushrooming
of what are referred to as ‘corporate colleges’
and private schools at the Intermediate level
(11 th and 12 th class), whose main purpose is
to train students to succeed in the common
entrance tests that control admission to most
professional courses in India – especially the
EAMCET. 19 The most successful of these
corporate chains are the Sri Chaitanya and
Narayana groups. These colleges are popular
with middle class parents, despite their high
fees and punishing study regimens, because
they yield good results in the EAMCET and
other competitive exams such as the JEE
(Joint Entrance Exam for the IITs, the Indian
Institutes of Technology). On its website, Sri
Chaitanya is explicit about its mission:
For example, Gudlavalleru Engineering College, a rural college in Krishna District, was set up by the Adusumilli Aswardha Narayana
Murthy & Vallurupalli Venkata Rama Seshadri Rao Educational Society, established in Gudlavalleru village in 1981. The Society first started
a polytechnic institute, then an English medium ‘public school’, followed by the engineering college in 1998. The group also includes a
pharmacy institute. http://gecgudlavalleru.ac.in/content/view/507/565/. Accessed September 15, 2013.
17
Vignan’s motto is ‘Building Young India’. See: http://www.vignanuniversity.org/aboutus/vignangroup.html. Accessed September 21, 2013.
18
EAMCET is the Engineering, Agricultural and Medical Common Entrance Test, conducted annually in Andhra Pradesh to regulate
admissions to private colleges. According to one source, the coaching industry for the EAMCET alone is worth an estimated Rs. 5,000
crore (about $110 million) a year. http://www.deccanherald.com/content/127552/content/213841/F. Accessed September 15, 2013.
19
11
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
who step out of Sri Chaitanya learn to chase
careers and not jobs.20
Such branded corporate colleges – most originating
in coastal towns – have become highly visible across
the state and beyond, sprouting up even in small
towns and displacing government-run and other
traditional intermediate colleges. These institutions
promote the idea that the sole aim of education is
to obtain a high rank in competitive exams, which in
turn is supposed to lead to successful careers in the
corporate sector, the professions, or government.
Although many parents recognise the drawbacks of
this approach to education, institutions such as Sri
Chaitanya and Narayana remain the most common
choices at least for the middle class.21 An informal
discussion with first-year students of a middleranked rural engineering college in Krishna district
revealed that two-thirds of the class had completed
their intermediate degrees from a Sri Chaitanya or
Narayana institute. The corporate college route
also facilitates migration: when I spoke to a group
of students at an education consultancy who were
applying to universities abroad, almost all said that
they had studied intermediate at a Sri Chaitanya or
Narayana school, followed by engineering or other
technical courses in private colleges.
Following the Sri Chaitanya style of education,
most schools and intermediate colleges in the state
have re-oriented their teaching to cater to a singlepoint agenda of preparing students to ‘crack’ these
exams, rather than simply getting their high school
certificates or good scores in 12th standard exams.
This instrumental, exam-oriented approach, together
with the widespread aspirations for professional
degrees, has spurred the restructuring of education
all the way down to the primary level. The region
has witnessed the mushrooming of private English-
medium schools, from expensive ‘public schools’
offering ‘international education’ to the many small
‘English-medium’ schools that have sprouted up
everywhere, feeding off the mobility aspirations of
ordinary families. As elsewhere in India, government
schools have seen declining enrolment and have
become the domain of dalits and the very poor;
most families that can afford the fees send their
children to private schools. At the other end of the
private education spectrum, a new breed of expensive
primary and high schools are marketed to affluent
urban families by emphasising their ‘global yet Indian’
orientation. Elite schools run by new groups such
as the NRI Educational Society based in Guntur,
and by established national franchise chains such as
Delhi Public School (DPS), have appeared in regional
towns. Similarly, the Vignan group has started a chain
of ‘Global Gen’ schools,22 while the Sri Chaitanya
group has a string of ‘Techno Schools’.23
The formation of a distinctive ‘educational
regime’ (Jeffery 2005) partially accounts for the
high density of engineering colleges in the region.
It also provides the backdrop to the most recent
development – the explosion in the number of
engineering colleges and a consequent over-supply
of seats.
The E ngineering E xplosion
and Degree Devaluation
In 1980, there were only 157 engineering and
technology institutions in India; the number
grew to 5,194 by 2012.24 Most of this growth is
accounted for by private engineering colleges, a
phenomenon that has been especially pronounced
in south India. In Andhra Pradesh, the number of
engineering colleges rose from 107 in 2001 to 238
in 2004-05, but by 2013 there were over 700 colleges
http://srichaitanya.net/vision.html. Accessed September 21, 2013.
20
Significantly, these chains include institutions with varying facilities and fees, to cater to different class segments.
21
From their website: ‘At Vignan along with the pursuit of academic excellence, our thrust is on education based on values. Our endeavour is
to foster the best of Indian values and cultivate a global outlook’; http://vignanschools.org/. Accessed September 27, 2013.
22
http://srichaitanyaschool.net/. Accessed September 21, 2013.
23
http://newindianexpress.com/opinion/Time-to-end-proliferation-of-engineering-colleges/2013/05/05/article1575110.ece. Accessed
October 1, 2013.
24
12
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
in the state, of which only ten are government
institutions. The four districts of Coastal Andhra
alone host nearly 200 engineering colleges offering
101,000 seats.25
In Andhra Pradesh, as elsewhere in south India,
the expansion in the number of private engineering
colleges was stimulated partly by the IT boom,
which provided lucrative employment to many
engineering graduates and so enhanced the demand
for engineering seats. But the growth curve took
a sharp upward turn after the introduction of the
‘fee reimbursement scheme’ in 2008-09 by the
Congress government led by Y.S. Rajasekhara
Reddy (who was popularly known as ‘YSR’). The
fee reimbursement scheme was meant to help
students from poor families and marginalised
communities – who earlier could not dream of an
engineering degree due to stiff competition for
entry and high fees – to access higher education.
Under this scheme, the state government covers
the full tuition fees of students belonging to
‘below poverty line’ (BPL), ‘backward caste’
(BC) and Scheduled Caste/ Scheduled Tribe
(SC/ ST) families, for most professional courses,
including engineering, medical, dentistry, pharmacy,
management, and education.26 The promulgation
of this policy encouraged the establishment of
many new colleges by businessmen and politicians,
who saw it as a lucrative business opportunity.
Education entrepreneurs believed that their colleges
would enjoy full student intake because many
more students would be able to join engineering
courses. Besides the mushrooming of new colleges,
existing ones increased their student intakes. These
developments led to the rapid ballooning in the
number of engineering seats to the current level
of over 300,000 in the undivided state.
More than 600,000 students availed of the scheme in
2012, of which 150,000 were engineering students.
According to several principals interviewed, 80
to 90 per cent of the convenor’s (government
allotted) quota of seats in their colleges is filled by
students covered by the reimbursement scheme.27
However, the programme has been the subject of
much debate and criticism in Andhra. It is widely
seen as a populist scheme floated by YSR for
electoral gains, or, more cynically, as a direct state
subsidy to the colleges that represents collusion
between politicians and business interests. Few
of the professors and principals of engineering
colleges with whom I spoke lauded the policy as
a social welfare tool, and most doubted whether
it has actually helped the under-privileged to gain
skills. Many people are also sceptical about the
programme because of alleged widespread fraud
in the issue of ration cards or ‘white cards’, which
are used as proof of income. Thus, the expansion
in engineering seats does not necessarily mean that
more students have entered the path of upward
mobility through higher education.
Leaving aside the question of whether the fee
reimbursement scheme has actually expanded
educational opportunities for the poor (on which
we have no concrete data), the point I wish to
highlight here that the state government has
introduced a ‘populist’ programme whose scope
is limited to a small fraction of the population. In
contrast to earlier welfare programmes pioneered
in the state, such as the Rs 2 per kilo rice scheme
of former Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao, this
policy stems from, and reproduces, the cultural
logic as well as the political economy of education
in Andhra, discussed above. The popularity of this
scheme reflects the central symbolic position that
Engineering colleges are scattered across the state, with the largest concentration around the capital city of Hyderabad (especially in Ranga
Reddy District), followed by Coastal Andhra. Guntur District has 68 engineering colleges; Krishna District, 45; West Godavari District, 37
colleges; and East Godavari, 46. http://apecet.nic.in/institute_profile.aspx. Accessed September 18, 2013.
25
26
When the fee reimbursement scheme was introduced in 2008, it partially covered the fees of students in professional colleges belonging to
the backward castes (OBCs, SCs, and STs). In 2009 the scheme was extended to Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, defined as those who
have ‘white cards’ (ration cards issued to families with incomes of less than Rs. 1100 per month), and was expanded to cover the entire tuition fee at the lowest fee level set by the government (Rs. 35,000 per year in 2012-13).
27
The state government regulates admissions to private colleges. Seventy per cent of the seats in private colleges (the ‘convener’s’ or government quota) are allocated by a centralised system, for which the fees are set by the government, while 30 per cent of the seats are in the
‘management quota’, for which colleges may select students directly and charge higher fees.
13
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
engineering degrees occupy in public culture in
this region and beyond. In addition, by extending
access to students from lower castes and social
classes, it has helped to disseminate the dominant
social imaginary – of economic and social mobility
through the acquisition of particular degrees –
across a wider cross-section of society.
However, according to many observers and
several official reports, the rapid growth in this
sector has led to a sharp decline in the quality
of education and, by extension, in the calibre
of engineers produced by this system. Indeed,
many institutions are functioning with inadequate
facilities and under-qualified faculty. Due to the
much-discussed ‘crisis’ of quality as well as the
sudden rise in the number of seats available, it is
now a buyer’s market for engineering degrees. In
contrast to the earlier period when many applicants
had to compete for limited places, during the last
two years (2012 and 2013) many colleges in the state
were unable to fill their seats, despite the incentive
provided by the fee reimbursement scheme. In
the 2013-14 academic year, around 300,000 seats
were available in 720 engineering colleges in the
state, of which 108,000 seats remained vacant,
largely due to the widespread perception that
many colleges offer sub-standard education.28 With
declining employment opportunities in IT and
widely circulating stories about the poor quality of
many engineering colleges, families are now wary
of investing resources in this kind of education.29
Thus, although the fee reimbursement scheme is
supposed to provide wider access to engineering
education, it has also led to a devaluation of the
degree – undercutting the aspirations that made it
popular in the first place.
Another important point to note here is that
the popular view about the decline in ‘quality’ in
engineering education largely flows from the IT
industry. As engineering colleges have been retooled
as factories for the production of software engineers
(Upadhya and Vasavi 2006), colleges cater mainly
to the industry’s requirements. They also market
themselves based on their ‘placement’ statistics
rather than the quality of their faculty, examination
results, or other such measures. The placement
data showcased on college websites show that most
campus recruitment is by IT companies.30 The IT
industry has made several efforts to help colleges
re-orient their curricula and teaching methods to
produce ‘industry-ready’ engineers, through tie-ups
between individual companies and colleges as well as
the efforts of the main industry body, NASSCOM.31
However, official studies have repeatedly found that
only about 20 per cent of graduates are ‘employable’.
This discourse about the ‘unemployability’ of most
graduate engineers actually refers to the needs
of the IT industry rather than to their training in
fundamental engineering subjects and analytical
skills. This trend has been criticised by many teachers
and academics, especially the older generation of
engineering professors who have witnessed the
http://education.oneindia.in/news/2013/09/18/andhra-pradesh-completes-first-round-of-engineering-admissions-006596.html.
Accessed November 05, 2013. Only 290,000 candidates appeared for engineering in the 2013 EAMCET, although there were over 300,000
seats available; (http://www.deccanchronicle.com/130918/news-current-affairs/article/one-lakh-engineering-seats-go-vacant-0. Accessed
November 05, 2013). Over 200,000 students qualified in the exam (http://www.myengg.com/engg/info/26095/2-lakh-engineeringstudents-qualified-in-eamcet-2013/. Accessed September 15, 2013). These figures suggest that engineering continues to be the most popular
educational choice, despite the crisis in this sector. More recently, however, students are looking at other career options such as chartered
accountancy (CA) and the IAS (government services).
28
A number of engineering colleges are slated for closure because they have not been able to recruit sufficient numbers of students. According
to a report by the All India Institute of Technical Education (AICTE, a regulatory body), of the 143 technical institutes in India that had
applied for permission to close in 2012, 56 were in Andhra Pradesh. See A. Srinivasa Rao, ‘Engineering colleges in AP prepare to shut
down as students stay away’, India Today, Hyderabad, May 1, 2012. http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/andhra-pradesh-engineering-collegesstudents/1/186862.html. Accessed September 12, 2013.
29
College websites usually list only students who receive offers from companies during campus recruitment drives; most do not collect data
on the employment status of their other graduates.
30
In several colleges in Krishna and Guntur districts, I observed computer labs sponsored by large software companies; for example KL
University has labs set up by IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, etc; http://www.kluniversity.in/speclabs.aspx. Accessed July 29, 2014. Companies
also sponsor special training programmes, such as Infosys’ ‘Campus Connect’; see http://www.pvpsiddhartha.ac.in/index.sit?service=TP_
HOMEPAGE. Accessed July 29, 2014.
31
14
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
transformation of education wrought by the rise
of the IT industry. According to a professor who
retired from a government engineering college and
now teaches in a private college in Vijayawada:
The IT industry repeatedly makes the point
that only 10-20 per cent of engineering
graduates are employable. But we want to
teach for the 100 per cent, not for this 20
per cent... Why is there so much discussion
in the newspapers about poor quality? It is
because the voice of the software companies
is heard more than our voice. From their point
of view these graduates are useless, but the
needs of IT and ours are different. We want
our students to get absorbed in all kinds of
industries. In reality, the people who get IT
jobs are those who can talk nicely – that is
what they want, people who can sell their
products. But I want to train students who
can produce products.
Thus, the popular narrative about the decline in
quality draws a distinction between the cream of
students who have the educational and cultural
capital to get job offers from IT companies (those
who can ‘talk nicely’), and the majority who are
thrown into the job market without the requisite
skills or knowledge to succeed in a global industry.
That this narrative has become the ‘common sense’
view of educationists, the middle class, and the
English media reveals the extent to which the ‘IT
dream’ has colonised not only the aspirations of
youth in Andhra (and many other places) but also
the field of higher education.
There is no space here to explore further the
effects of these developments in higher education
on marginalised groups, except to suggest that
the new educational regime inflects the mobility
strategies of students and their families in diverse
social locations. As noted above, private educational
and training institutions have mushroomed
across Coastal Andhra to cater to aspirations
for engineering degrees and IT jobs, which have
filtered much beyond the regional elite and middle
classes, influencing the educational choices of even
poor rural students. Yet the education system that
has been crafted by Andhra provincial capital,
with substantial help from the state and the
political class, has engendered new axes of social
differentiation even as it promises mobility and
equality of access. For example, students from
middle class or affluent urban families are better
placed to gain entry to top-ranked colleges because
they can afford the high fees of ‘corporate colleges’
and coaching classes, or they get seats in the
‘management quota’. These are the students who
are also more likely to go abroad for higher studies,
thereby reproducing the power of the regional
elite through enhanced transnationalisation. On
the other side, thousands of students have been
funnelled into poor quality colleges via the fee
reimbursement scheme, only to acquire ‘useless’
degrees (Jeffrey 2010; Jeffrey, Jeffery and Jeffery
2008) that leave them ‘unemployable’, at least in the
IT industry to which many aspire. These ‘educated’
youth are likely to experience a very different kind
of ‘mobility’ from that promised by the dominant
social imaginary of the region.
Educational Restructuring
and Mobility
In this paper I have argued that the history and
political economy of education in Coastal Andhra
positioned the region as a key source of IT labour
for the global economy. The out-migration of
many educated youth in search of IT jobs, in turn,
fostered a culture of migration that is reshaping
the ‘educational regime’ of the region. Although
the desire to migrate to America is certainly not
the only reason for the rapid expansion of private
engineering education – the fee reimbursement
scheme being a major recent factor – the popular
imaginary that connects migration with social
mobility, success, and prestige has underwritten
the intense desire for engineering degrees as well
as the fee reimbursement scheme itself.
I have focused on indirect linkages between a
regional political economy and culture of education
15
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
and a particular pattern of out-migration. The
privatisation and commercialisation of higher
education, promoted and sustained by state policies,
is an outcome of Coastal Andhra’s historical
development into a distinctive regional social and
cultural configuration, in which provincial capital
and the regional elite have long been ‘invested’
in education, in both senses of the term – as an
opportunity for capital accumulation as well as
a very desirable form of cultural capital. From
this perspective, it becomes clear that both kinds
of investment – families in the education of
children and business entrepreneurs in educational
institutions – flow from the same cultural logic.
This concatenation of diverse impulses and
16
developments may be understood as a ‘regionalglobal’ assemblage (Ong and Collier 2005), in which
contingent elements are loosely stitched together:
the fetishisation of engineering degrees; the
iconisisation of the figures of the software engineer
and the NRI; the creation of an aspirational culture
of migration; and the emergence of education as
a lucrative business. Here I have tried to map only
a few of the connections among these diverse
elements and processes in order to unravel the ways
in which aspirations for engineering degrees and IT
jobs (often code for the desire for migration) have
contributed to the restructuring and corporatisation
of education, and to new modes and modalities of
social mobility and immobility.
Engineering Mobility?
The ‘It Craze’, Transnational Migration, and the
Commercialisation of Education in Coastal Andhra
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Provincial Globalisation Working Paper Series
• WP 1: Measuring International Remittances in India: Concepts and Empirics, by Puja Guha (July, 2011)
• WP 2: Diaspora Philanthropy from a Homeland Perspective: Reciprocity and Contestation over Donations
in Central Gujarat, India, by Natascha Dekkers and Mario Rutten (August, 2011)
• WP 3: Economics of Migration and Remittances: A Review Article, by Puja Guha (August, 2011)
• WP 4: Provincial Globalisation: Transnational Flows and Regional Development, by Carol Upadhya and
Mario Rutten (January, 2012)
• WP 5: Middling Migration: Contradictory Mobility Experiences of Indian Youth in London, by Mario
Rutten and Sanderien Verstappen (January, 2012)
• WP 6: Migrants’ Private Giving and Development: Diasporic Influences on Development in Central
Gujarat, India, by Puja Guha (August, 2013)
About the Provincial Globalisation Programme
The Provincial Globalisation research programme (‘ProGlo’) explores transnational connections between
Overseas Indians and their home regions, especially the ‘reverse flows’ of resources into India and
their effects. The research is documenting a broad range of resource transfers by migrants, including
economic resources (such as household remittances, investments in land and philanthropy), social remittances (including flows of ideas, support for NGOs), and cultural flows (such as religious donations),
and their influences on regional level development. The programme consists of several independent but
interlinked research projects located in three Indian regions – coastal Andhra Pradesh, coastal Karnataka
and central Gujarat.
‘ProGlo’ is a collaborative research programme of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research
(AISSR), University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies
(NIAS), Bangalore, India, funded by the WOTRO Science for Global Development programme of the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Netherlands, initiated in 2010.
Programme directors:
Prof. Mario Rutten (AISSR)
Prof. Carol Upadhya (NIAS)
www.provglo.org