Has India Enough Engineers To Fix Infrastructure

Call it India’s engineering paradox. Despite this nation’s rise as a technology titan with some of the world’s best engineering minds, India’s full economic potential is stifled by potholed roadways, collapsing bridges, rickety railroads and a power grid so unreliable that many modern office buildings run their own diesel generators to make sure the lights and computers stay on.

It is not for want of money. The Indian government aims to spend $500 billion on infrastructure by 2012 and twice that amount in the following five years.

The problem is a dearth of engineers — or at least the civil engineers with the skill and expertise to make sure those ambitious projects are done on time and up to specifications.

Civil engineering was once an elite occupation in India, not only during the British colonial era of carving roads and laying train tracks, but also long after independence as part of the civil service. These days, though, India’s best and brightest know there is more money and prestige in writing software for foreign customers than in building roadways for their nation.

And so it is that 26-year-old Vishal Mandvekar, despite his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, now writes software code for a Japanese automaker.

Mr. Mandvekar works in an air-conditioned building with Silicon Valley amenities here in Pune, a boomtown about 100 miles east of Mumbai. But getting to and from work requires him to spend a vexing hour on his motorcycle, navigating the crowded, cratered roads between home and his office a mere nine miles away.

During the monsoon season, the many potholes “are filled with water and you can’t tell how deep they are until you hit one,” he said.

Fixing all that, though, will remain some other engineer’s problem.

Mr. Mandvekar earns a salary of about $765 a month. That is more than three times what he made during his short stint for a commercial contractor, supervising construction of lodging for a Sikh religious group, after he earned his degree in 2006.

“It was fun doing that,” he said of the construction job. “My only dissatisfaction was the pay package.”

Young Indians’ preference for software over steel and concrete poses an economic conundrum for India. Its much-envied information technology industry generates tens of thousands of relatively well-paying jobs every year. But that lure also continues the exodus of people qualified to build the infrastructure it desperately needs to improve living conditions for the rest of its one billion people — and to bolster the sort of industries that require good highways and railroads more than high-speed Internet links to the West