Students at the National Institute of Technology Patna (NIT Patna) will have to do a six-month internship at a company or a project under the supervision of expert teachers in the eighth and last semester of their four-year engineering course.

Earlier, the last semester was meant for tutorial classes in theory papers. The internship/project push is meant to give the techies hands-on training at working in a company, or at devising engineering solutions in demand in the real world.

"The basic thrust of the scheme is that when students join any company they don't face difficulties in working," explained Prakash Chandra, a mechanical engineering department faculty member at NIT Patna. "We don't want that working on a machine or developing software should feel alien for techies."

The eighth semester practical training course will have 20 credits. The four-year engineering course consists of 170 credits.

The new scheme has already been introduced in NIT. Many students in their eighth semester are already doing internships at different companies, and others are doing projects.

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has made internship or project work in the last semester mandatory for engineering students.

Sources said it was done because it has been observed that engineering students after completion of their course find difficulties in getting jobs as they don't have practical knowledge.

"Our engineering curriculum gives more focus on theory than practical," said a teacher at NIT Patna's electrical engineering department who did not want to be identified. "There is very little scope for skill development.

"If you ask an engineering student to make a circuit design on paper, he can easily make it but when it comes to joining a circuit practically they will find difficulties," the teacher said, adding that this was the main reason behind many tech cradles suffering in placing their students in jobs.

NIT Patna students who are doing projects said they are happy that they are getting to work on projects that have practical applications.

For example Divyanshu Shahi, a fourth year mechanical engineering student, is working on a project to develop a semi-automatic wheelchair.

"The motive of the project is to provide special mobility assistance to differently abled people," Divyanshu explained. "Currently, they use wheelchairs for indoor purposes and tricycles for outdoor purposes."

The project he is working on seeks to change that and equip the wheelchair for outdoor operation as well.

For this, the students are working on an attachment that will turn the wheelchair into a battery-powered tricycle so that it can be used for both indoor and outdoor purposes.

There will also be provision to charge the battery through solar energy.

The frame of the wheelchair will have a solar panel.

"The person can attach a motor in this wheelchair which can move at a speed of 20km per hour," Divyanshu said.

"The wheelchairs most commonly available in the market are either completely manual or totally mechanised, but my work is to develop a wheel chair which is semi-automatic."