An alumni's vision to boost Research and Development

His words are measured and look like they have been thought about a zillion times. The 54-year-old Bhaskar Ramamurthy, director, IIT Madras (IIT-M), Chennai, graduated in BTech Electronics from IIT-M in 1975-80. He went on to complete an integrated MS-PhD in electrical engineering from University of California-Santa Barbara, USA, in 1984. After his doctorate, he worked with AT&T Bell Laboratories, USA, on problems in indoor wireless communications. In 1986, he joined his alma mater as a faculty and in September, 2011, was appointed as the institute’s 10th director. His areas of specialisation include communications and signal processing. His research domains are wireless networks, modulation, wireless data, and audio and video compression. He is a founding member of the TeNeT group of IIT Madras, which is into developing telecom and networking technologies and incubating companies to develop and market products based on these. Currently, he is honorary director of the Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology, a public-private initiative at the IIT-M Research Park.

Ramamurthy’s appointment is being disputed — it has been alleged that his appointment was made without the approval of the Appointment Committee of Cabinet, headed by the prime minister. Through information obtained through RTI act, it has come to notice that the then human resources minister, Kapil Sabil, had appointed Ramamurthy without the knowledge and approval of the council. Ramamurthy refused to comment on this issue. Excerpts from an interview...

What are your goals as director of IIT-M?

IITs are accused of focusing more on UG courses rather than master’s and PhD. Earlier we were bogged down by non-availability of resources. Now resources aren’t the major problem anymore. We need to produce and recruit PhDs who make a difference to the industry. I want the PhDs graduating from IIT-M to help the society with problems concerning basic necessities such as drinking water, electricity, etc. While we have maintained the quality of our UG programmes, I want the same enthusiasm to be applied to our PG programmes, which can yield lucrative jobs as well.

A common refrain is that IITs are pockets of excellence because of its students, who are a motivated lot, and not the faculty members.

If motivated students join us and make things easy for us, what’s there to complain? Students are not only inspired by the faculty, they learn equally or even more from their peers. That said, you can’t underestimate the quality of our faculty members.

The new IITs have received only a lukewarm response from candidates. As an IITian, how do you view this?

NITs have risen today and I feel when students also look at them as an option, these misconceptions arise. Even if more IITs arise, it doesn’t mean the brand is getting diluted. This is not your Levis jean or something, where you need to worry about more outlets being introduced.

Do you think MOOC initiatives like edX, Coursera, and Udacity are going to influence classroom learning?

Long before these platforms came up, IITs had embraced the MOOC method of learning. You have NPTEL, which has about 800-900 courses and is the largest in the world. MOOC is good for supplementary learning, but whether they will revolutionalise classroom learning is yet to be seen.

What are the prospects for PhD scholars in India?

At IIT-M, we don’t recruit anyone without a PhD, which is the minimum norm for recruitment. At our institute, we have seen an increase in PhD intake. Things are changing for good. Our target is to churn out 350-400 PhDs every year in the near future. Also, we aren’t churning out more PhDs than we can absorb. For a recent experiment, I studied about 800 PhDs who graduated from IIT-M in the past five years. Of these, we found 600 to be well-placed. Fifty per cent are in the industry, of these 40 per cent constitute private industries. One-fifth of the total number are placed in government labs, organisations like DRDO, etc. While some have moved on to postdoctoral studies, 25 per cent have infiltrated the academia, which is a positive sign. Though I can’t reveal their salaries, they are comfortably placed financially.

IIT’s revised admission policy has been criticised. Is it going to be changed?

We found to our dismay that students are according more importance to JEE rather than their boards. In places like Kota, students hardly attend schools but write exams. Whatever be your board, in order to be eligible for admission you need to be in the top 20 percentile.