The following is the letter I sent to the members of the Council of Architecture on 1 March 2025, now shared here for broader awareness.
01 May 2025
To
The Council of Architecture,
India Habitat Centre, Core 6A, 1st Floor,
Lodhi Road, New Delhi-110003 India
This is not a letter of blame—it is a letter of deep concern, urgency, and reflection. It comes not from outside the profession, but from within—from an architect who has experienced its evolution over decades and witnessed how we are failing the very future we are supposed to build.
The Internships We Mandate Are Not Always Shaping Architects—They Risk Undermining Their Foundations
Every year, thousands of architecture students in India are required to undergo full-time internships—typically for six months, sometimes longer—as a mandatory part of their B.Arch curriculum. This period is meant to be a professional bridge between education and practice. But in reality, for a majority of students, it has become a period of financial stress, intellectual stagnation, and emotional fatigue.
The Ground Reality We All Know—And Yet Stay Silent
Interns are often paid between ₹5,000 to ₹10,000 a month—if at all. That’s less than the daily wage of a skilled labourer.
- Many students relocate to cities, spending far more on accommodation, food, and transport than they earn.
- Only a handful of firms in each city offer genuine mentorship or project exposure.
- Most interns are reduced to CAD drafters, quantity checkers, or silent observers—and many quietly wonder: Did I really need to study architecture for five years to do this kind of work?
- In worst cases, interns are used as cheap labour—without learning, without dignity, without future prospects.
How is this acceptable? Why are we still endorsing a framework where only a fortunate few receive meaningful exposure, while the rest perform clerical drudgery masked as "experience"—just to fulfil a compulsory requirement?
And if they can’t afford the financial burden, they are left with no choice but to surrender to poor-quality firms that teach them the wrong lessons, reinforce bad ethics, and set low expectations—or to moderate, average offices that are themselves struggling to pay interns anything at all.
And yet, we claim that internships are meant to build the architect.
What Students Take Away—And What They Don’t
What should be a turning point in a student’s life often becomes a breaking point. Interns return to college with:
- A loss of idealism and hope
- Disinterest in core design, or a gradual loss of respect for the discipline itself,
- Little real understanding of site, client, or context,
- And a growing feeling that architecture as a profession is either out of reach or unworthy of aspiration.
Many of these students quietly move into unrelated fields after graduation. Not because they lack ability—but because we failed to make their learning journey meaningful, respected, and rewarding.
The Responsibility That Comes With Mandating Internships
Internships are not just a university requirement—they are a regulatory mandate shaped by CoA. Since they are mandatory, the responsibility to ensure their effectiveness and fairness lies solely with CoA. This is not an auxiliary issue—it is central to how we shape the profession.
CoA rightly protects the use of the title "Architect." But protecting the title means little if we don’t uphold the dignity and purpose of the journey it represents. When students lose interest or confidence in architecture right at the threshold of earning the title, we must ask ourselves: what have we protected, and what have we lost?
We are not just protecting the title”Architect”:—we must also nurture its meaning by guiding students with care, exposure, and purpose as they transition from interns to professionals.
Strengthening the Future: CoA’s Role in Enabling Change
This letter is not a criticism in isolation. It is a call to act with leadership, vision, and accountability.
A. Fix the Fundamentals: Stipends and Alternative Internship Formats
1. Mandate Minimum Stipends
- Publish region-wise minimum stipend benchmarks linked to living costs.
- Firms failing to comply should be removed from the list of approved internship providers.
2. Accredit Alternate Internship Formats
- Students working under NGOs, urban design collectives, research labs, or faculty-led design cells must be credited equivalently.
- Work with public agencies such as central and state public works departments, housing boards, and town planning bodies should be eligible for credit.
- Participation in projects with developers and builders—if documented and mentored appropriately—should also qualify.
- Site-based documentation, user studies, and post-occupancy evaluations should count as valid internship work.
- Engagement in neighbourhood-scale or urban initiatives with local communities, municipal partnerships, or informal settlements should be formally supported.
- Case study-based internships, where students engage deeply with existing built environments and publish findings or papers under supervision, should also be recognised.
B. Build Systems That Support Transparency and Ethics
3. Create a National Internship Registry
- Build a transparent portal of verified practices open to all institutions.
- Let students rate and review their internship experience to maintain professional standards.
4. Publish an Internship Code of Conduct
- Define the ethical expectations from firms who take interns.
- Emphasise that mentorship is a professional responsibility—not optional goodwill.
5. Enable Funding Support Through CSR Initiatives
- Encourage firms, institutions, and councils to explore funding support for student internships under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives.
- Facilitate partnerships with private sector companies, real estate developers, and public agencies to co-finance stipends and research-based internships.
- Create a framework where architecture firms that cannot afford to pay can still host interns ethically by opting into supported programs.
Acknowledging What’s Already Working
This letter is not written to disregard the good that already exists. Across India, there are practices—small and large—that take mentoring seriously. Some firms open their design process to interns, invite them to sites, expose them to real client dialogue, and assign responsibilities that build confidence. There are professors who guide independent case studies or host meaningful design cells that operate like micro-offices. A few colleges have even experimented with structured internship journals and peer-to-peer learning.
These examples are scattered but powerful. They demonstrate that it is possible to design internship experiences that are ethical, enriching, and formative. This letter is not a critique of these rare exceptions—it is a call to make them the norm.
This Is Bigger Than One Firm or One Student
We know some offices that mentor with sincerity. We know students who thrive despite poor conditions. But the system should not depend on exceptions. It must work for the average student across the country—across big cities and small towns alike.
Today, it works for too few.
If we do not act, we risk producing a generation of graduates who may carry the title of “architect” but never feel the worth of it.
In Closing
India is positioning itself among the largest economies in the world. We are advancing in every domain—space, digital infrastructure, defence, entrepreneurship. But in architecture, we are witnessing a sobering contrast.
Over the past decade, architectural education in India has witnessed a visible decline. While India rises as one of the world’s largest economies, the number of architecture colleges has dropped from 400 to 351 between 2016–17 and 2022–23, with several institutions seeking closure. B.Arch enrolment has fallen by over 40% during this same period, and interest in the architecture stream within national entrance exams like JEE-Main has also declined. This points to a larger crisis of relevance and urgency within architectural education today(as per AICTE/CoA data 2022–23).
In a country striving to lead globally, this steady erosion of interest in architecture should concern us all. It is not just about numbers—it is about the growing disconnect between how architecture is taught, how it is practiced, and how it is experienced by society.
This is your mandate. And now, it must be your priority.
The responsibility lies with the CoA—but the possibility lies with all of us.
With hope and responsibility,
Srinivas Valluri
Architect