Civil is about learning and getting skills rather than getting placed with good packages. India is in desperate need of qualified civil engineers. Not every Civil Engineering graduate is skilled enough and yet is employed as an engineer leading to failure of structure and accidents. So your primary goal is to be knowledgeable and skilled rather than running after placements. There is also a huge scope of research outside India. Here are the placement statistics of the Civil Engineering branch of NIT Surathkal

Ultimately, bear in mind that you won’t be earning much initially as a civil engineer but with the passage of time you will earn a lot in terms of money and respect both. 

I did my M.Tech Civil from VNIT Nagpur. Thus, I can highlight the placement scenario for my specialization (i.e. Transportation Engineering)-

The companies that recruit from VNIT include- AARVEE Associate, LnT ECC, Spectrum Techno Consultants Pvt Ltd, Nagpur Metro Rail Corporation Limited, Onnyx Electronics, JMC Project Ltd, L and T Infra, WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff, Bajaj Reinforcement LLP, etc. 

Apart from this, some educational institutes also visit for recruitments. These are- S R Patel College of Engineering, Sandip University and Sandip Foundation, BASE Educational Services Pvt Ltd, Adyant Education Pvt. Ltd, Franchises of Aakash Educational Services Pvt Ltd, Avanti Fellows, A.R.M.I.E.T. Thane, Ballarpur Institute of Technology (BIT), PT Education, and Sharda Group of Institutions.

Around 80% students are placed, both on campus and off campus. This includes those who crack government exams, or are appointed as assistant professors. Some students opt for higher studies, while some obtain a CGPA< 6.75. Both of those aren’t included in these placement stats. 

The placements are decent for M.Tech Civil at VNIT Nagpur. The college workload is quite manageable. This allows students to prepare for and crack government exams.

It is not that NIT Rourkela placement cell does not allow Civil Engineering students to sit for CSE placements. The thing is that most software companies that visit the campuses with SDE roles do not allow other branches to sit for their placements. I assume by CSE placements you are referring to IT companies.

Certain top companies like Microsoft, Google, Goldman Sachs and Mathworks allow students from all the branches to sit for their placements. But for most software companies, branch is one of the criteria to filter out those students who can apply. Also, they mostly prefer students from CSE and circuital branches like EI, EC and EE. 

The reason being that students from these branches work with codes more often and are well-versed in programming languages. The same is imperative for working in IT companies. However, it is also true that many students in other branches love to code and wish to work in these IT firms.

NIT Rourkela has no control over the criteria set by various IT companies and you will have to check the same before planning to sit for the placement of any IT firm.

IIT Madras is ranked among the top 50 colleges in the world for civil and structural engineering courses. It is the only institution where the average salary of the CE branch is better than the average across all branches. This could be because one student of IIT Madras was placed at a salary of INR 52.50 lakh – the highest salary for any Civil Engineering student.

Placements for all the branches at IITs in general and IIT madras, in particular, are the same except for CS and EE. This is because most students of branches other than these two end up taking non-core jobs like finance, analytics, software, consulting, and management because they offer a better package than core jobs. On the other hand, CS and EE students get excellent offers from many software companies thereby offering better roles. 

The average salary of CS, EE, and other branches at IIT Madras is given below