BTech CS Is Not Over — India's Real Problem Is That We Haven't Built Enough Difficult Software...

Whoever is saying that in Bharat, the days of BTech CS is over, and it's time for core engg subjects like civil mechanical electrical chemical are missing a critical point - all these core engg industries need heavy support of CS - one software like an HMI for industrial automation, or any software like FreeCAD or OpenFoam needs many years of software development knowledge. The problem is that in Bharat we have not at all focused on developing such comprehensive and difficult software so far. We worked merely as IT coolies, and mark my words, these coolies will be discarded, not the real CS researchers and scientists.

Let me clarify it...

Industrial automation → HMI/SCADA, PLC tooling, real-time systems, digital twins, industrial networking and control software.

Mechanical engineering → CAD/CAE, multibody dynamics, FEM, robotics, manufacturing simulation.

Civil engineering → BIM, structural simulation, GIS, infrastructure digital twins.

Chemical engineering → process simulation, CFD, optimization and process-control software.

Aerospace/defence → flight software, simulation, computational fluid dynamics, embedded systems, mission planning.

Scientific computing → software such as OpenFOAM requires mathematics, numerical methods, physics and substantial software-engineering expertise.

CAD → FreeCAD is not simply a “program”; it sits at the intersection of geometry, numerical computation, graphics, data structures and engineering.

And that's precisely why “core engineering vs CS” is a misleading dichotomy. Modern engineering increasingly needs computational engineering.

A civil engineer may understand structural mechanics, but building a serious structural-analysis platform requires CS. A mechanical engineer may understand thermodynamics and mechanics, but creating a CAD/CAE platform requires CS, mathematics and geometry. An automation engineer may understand the plant, but an industrial HMI requires software architecture, graphics, networking, real-time behaviour and human-computer interaction.

The more interesting question for India is therefore:

Can we move from consuming and implementing software to building difficult software that becomes engineering infrastructure itself?

That is a much more consequential question than whether students should choose CS or mechanical engineering.

India Doesn't Need Less CS. It Needs Deeper CS.