1.Last April, 1.4 million candidates appeared for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), making it one of the biggest single day exams in human history.
2.The number of people who appeared for that single exam is more than the total number of people who appeared for the GMAT and GRE put together, across the entire world, that entire year.
3.India produces about 1.5 million engineers every year.
4.That's more engineers, annually, than twice the population of Iceland.
5.And it's way more engineers than the United States and China produce every year. Combined.
6.The engineering coaching industry in India is worth multiple billions of dollars.
7.And it spins more money every year than all of Bollywood.
8.Nearly 16% of startups in Silicon Valley have had an Indian co-founder.
9.Which is the highest for an immigrant country, and higher than Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan combined.
10.Various industry reports suggest more than 75% of engineers in India are simply unemployable.
11.And more than half of Indian engineers take it up as a career either because of their parents or because "they don't know what else to do".
12.Which is why basically every field in India – no matter how non-engineering related – is littered with engineering graduates.
13.An if engineering were a religion in India, it would be the fifth most popular one.
These facts were sent to BuzzFeed India by Adhitya Iyer, author of The Great Indian Obsession, an upcoming book about the scale of India's obsession with engineering. Learn more about it here.
