Road to better IITs

There is no doubt that IIT has been the prime face of technical education in India. If the IITs are not ranked in the top 100 universities worldwide, it is really a question of research than scholastic ability.  Since 1970s, each year, at least 500 IIT graduates come to the US and have successfully illustrated to the Americans what people from India are capable of. The pity is that most of them never looked back. To call it brain drain is an understatement. Students from other Indian universities also come to the US in equal numbers and are doing well. I realised the fact, when I came here for my graduation. Though I am not an IIT graduate, I studied at Osmania University in Hyderabad. I did my graduation from a small university in Texas, where I got a PhD in engineering. And I hope, it pains no one if I state that even my university, ranked absolutely nowhere in the US, and still produces better PhDs than any IIT in India. This may be hard to believe, but in India, the emphasis is placed on knowing the answer to a question, whereas in the US, the emphasis is laid on understanding the question. Because, in order to be a leader in technology, it is not enough to know the answers, in fact,  you need to predict the new questions. I apologise to all IIT professors when I say that they seem to merely answer questions posed by the West, rather than coming up with new questions. Simply put, you are the leader when you ask the questions, not when you answer them.

So what is the answer to the fact that IITs are not listed in the top 100 universities worldwide? So if the Chancellor of the IITs says to the Indian public, “Double our funding and we will improve technology in India”, then should you believe him?  I say the answer is a resounding No. Increasing funds for the IITs is not going to improve technology in India. The problem is systemic. Did you know for instance that the IITs have a sanctioned strength of professors which is more than the number of professors in the IITs? There are vacancies which have not been filled for years. Please understand that I am not stating that deserving candidates have been turned away as I have absolutely no way of knowing. What I am saying is that the hiring process depends too much on the professors already in the IITs who seem to be protecting their own turf.

The Government spends lakhs of rupees in IITs besides the exuberant fee spent by the students themselves and when several of them go abroad, India does not get anything in return for the it has spent on them. If you look at ISRO, EIL, BDL, DRDO, DRDL, HAL, BHEL, SAIL, IOCL, ONGC and GAIL, how many IIT graduates do you think you will find? Did you know less than 10 per cent of the engineers in these companies are from IITs? These companies determine everything from national security to the price of petrol in the country. I say to you that you will find that only a small fraction of IIT graduates actually work as engineers in India. Most IIT graduates either choose management or IT or just go abroad. So, why not take all the State universities in India and merge them into the IIT system? Put an IIT college in every major city in India. Choose the top 100 IIT professors and televise all their lectures so that every engineering student in India can attend lectures even in remote centres. Use video on demand so that old lectures can be referred if a student misses a lecture. India really needs to reduce the emphasis on who is teaching or who is learning and instead emphasise what is being taught and on rigorous testing to ensure that students can solve the engineering problems. India needs to set aside the egos which some of these IIT professors have and make IITs more of a business to educate large numbers of students adequately. Remember that with more than 1 billion people in India, it is simply not enough that only 3000 students get a good engineering education each year.

So, let India have a hundred IIT engineering colleges across the country and produce 30,000 good engineers each year.  This is not an unrealistic goal. Remember that as we speak India graduates much more than 30,000 engineers every year, but they possess average skills and most of them are only good for IT like software development. Even those who get engineering jobs need several years on-the-job training before they are successful. Therefore, by establishing hundred IIT engineering colleges throughout the country the standard will rise and India can become a hub for engineering design services. I would also suggest that like the universities in the US, India must use scholastic aptitude tests to determine who enters engineering colleges.  In the US, there is a lot of weight given to the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and the GRE because these tests do not determine which student know advanced mathematics or physics, in fact, the tests determine which student is capable of solving engineering problems. Sometimes students who have good scholastic ability but don’t have good marks in mathematics or physics, still become excellent engineers, why else would you find so many Indians professors in the US who never studied at IIT, because of their higher studies in the US and not their IIT education which made them successful! So, imitating Western methods to produce larger numbers of good engineers will help India because although you cannot stop brain drain, at least the engineers who remain in India will be of better quality and I firmly believe this can be done without spending any more money.