IITs: Myths and Miseries

Indian Institute of Technology is considered a brand name and the stamp of IIT is known to give access to better opportunities in both job and higher studies. The recent debate about increasing reservations at IIT and IIM has generated a lot of press. I have had written a few blogs expressing my strong opposition to the move, and the crux of the argument was that one must impart the capability to compete, the knowledge and aptitude to do well and select only the most meritorious irrespective of caste and religion. I realize now that one of the reasons why people think getting an IIT degree through reservations means anything is because they do not perceive a reality that most of us IITians know and agree upon. This reality is that the most important contribution of IIT system is having a Joint Entrance Examination, which helps them to select students who have good grasp of basic sciences and excellent speed and accuracy in solving mathematical problems.

IITs are not the best schools in the world in terms of either infrastructure or research or teaching resources. They cannot be, given the severe financial handicap imposed on them, primarily due to the huge dependence on government, and secondly because the system of both industrial and government funding is not as evolved as in the developed countries. We IITians know it for a fact that our most bankable attribute is not the education we received at IITs (even though it is perhaps the best we can get in India, though might be substandard compared to the world's best schools). Our most important quality is not what we learnt at IITs, but the fact that we are coming into the institutes through one of the toughest entrance examinations in the world. The brotherhood that prevails in IIT alumni is due to the recoginition of the fact that each one came through his toil and intellect. All the respect foreign universities and companies as well as the Indian industry has for an IIT engineer is based on the belief that these students represent the best of the lot. There is a self-confidence and belief in his intellectual ability propels an IITian to succeed in achieving his career goals. This belief is the reason why so many IITians have turned into successful enterprenuars.

Being an IITian helps one because people associate a certain minimum intellect with the graduates. But after coming to US, I realize how backward our laboratories (most of them) are compared to the facilities available here. In fact, IITs cannot even compete with the universities in Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and China in terms of both the research fundings and equipments available. For first few decades the IITs were primarily undergraduate institutions, but in recent years the number of seats for M. Techs and PhDs have been increased disproportionately in comparision to the resources available. Hence while undergraduates continue to garner the best jobs available, the PhDs from IITs are considered no good, just because they do their research work under severe handicaps in terms of facilities. IITians are often accused of leaving the country for greener pastuares, and one big reason for that (till recently) was a lack of equivalent opportunities in the country.

IITs are in severe need of good faculty. But given the amount of money available for a starting researcher, and the pay scale which cannot compete with any private sector job (its factor of four to five times lower even in Indian company comparison) means that people like me cannot rationalize moving back to India and teaching there. This is a serious issue, for without recruiting the best researchers and teachers, IITs cannot progress to become better research universities and their PhDs will be considered sub-standard even in comparison to other Asian countries. It is well-known that being government servants, the payscales of professors will remain dismal. For some of us who are willing to overlook the payscales, the absence of assured research funding and lack of world class resources make IITs as schools we would love to teach at, but will perhaps never teach at.

The IIT system still sells, as it procures the best product at the age of seventeen and eighteen, and provides these selected people four years of good grounding. This grounding is actually most useful in terms of non-academic changes that it brings to the individual. Since parents and society already recognize that you are brilliant, IITs allow us nerds to discover our artistic, altruistic and creative selves. The competition in anything we do is severe, and keeps the students driven to become the achievers in their fields. Only they who come to IIT on their own merit can profit from the extracurricular scene, the competitive edge and the respect reserved for they who know how to do exceptionally well. Since the calibre of students is good, teachers can afford to teach almost anything, or just give it as an assignment to figure on your own. So eventhough the resources are bad, in terms of what is taught, the level remains pretty good, but it is nothing compared to the grilling one undergoes just to get in.

The best engineers don't necessarily graduate from IITs. After graduation from engineering, the hierarchy of merit does not have IITians at the top, though in a distribution, they might still turn out to predominate list of the smartest (if exit exams are conducted, and of course, criterion of merit, howsoever flawed, is some examination, like JEE). The ones who are not as good as the non-IIT counterparts soon face stiff competition in real world, where again your ability and intellect is the only attribute that means anything. There is an astounding amount of peer pressure on every IITian, and this can be handled well by only those who possess the requisite determination, motivation and mathematical prowess as their counterparts. So be it DASA students (who come through SAT) or the quota students (who may be admitted even though they are lower on merit), they are traumatized more than they are benefitted here. IITians are always against a huge expectation from family, their research advisors in schools, their bosses in companies and their peers, and believe me this requires students who have come this far based on certain work ethic, certain intellectual stamina, certain ability, certain confidence that is achieved only by them who succeed in JEE. Of course, anyone with right combinations of these abilities, will rise to the top, irrespective of whether he studied what and where. In debates like these, we talk about averages and not exceptions and please base your comments on the generalized apects of "meritocracy" and elitism of IITs.

So while the current IITs suffer from both lack of infrastructure and hardships in hiring world class faculty, it is ridiculous to upgrade other universities and brand them as IIT. An astute management recognizes the need to maintain and upgrade quality, our government that lives off political powerplay panders more to its vote banks than to rational thinking, and hence the talk of renaming many other schools as IITs. It is hard for me to understand how our so called highly educated ministers and the bureaucracy that prides itself on their intellectual ability fail to see the real problems with our IIT system, and on a broader scale with the whole education system. If India really wants to become a developed nation, we need to improve the facilities at our temples of higher education. Neither reservation, nor renaming colleges nor diminishing research grants is going to help us. Rather these pose threat to the very brandname that they want to exploit.

Another aspect of IITs is that they need to evolve out of the initial organizational hiearchy that was established fifty years ago. This involves both the way in which government controls these centers of learning and how the promotions, recruiting and workload of professors is assigned and managed. A recent issue is of hiring inbred faculty, i.e. PhDs from IIT itself being hired into the same department. This is contrary to what most advanced schools practice, and the simple reason is that it is by hiring faculty with rich and diverse backgrounds that a school can get fresh ideas and be dynamic and progressive. Of course, hiring real quality people requires a plethora of changes in the system.

I think as the alumni of these esteemed intitutes, we owe the responsibility to our alma mater to maintain their standards. A few alumni have donated large sums to schools to build new labs and departments. I believe we need to have a board of alumni who work with the board of directors of IITs to rationalize alumni funding and spending. For years I have faught against the charges of brain drain, and I sincerely want each alumni to pay off the IIT system whatever the government has spent on our education. This will allow the current IITs a constant source of funding, and improve facilities, etc. A special fund needs to be set up to encourage world class researchers to settle and work at IITs. This, in fact, would be done best with industry giants start a series of sponsored chair positions of research in different IITs.

Some of the existing departments need to be revamped. In response to the research focus and problems, all Chemical Engineering schools in US have hired lot of faculty in bioengineering research and renamed their departments as Chemical and Biochemical Engineering. Similarly in United States, Metallurgy has become less important, so Material Science and Engineering programs have emerged, and rather than Textile Technology, most programs have transformed into Polymer and Textile Technology. Since most people are employed by software industries, we need to increase seats in Computer Science and perhaps allow more and more students to do dual degrees in say software. Similarly, many students who join IITs do so as they love Physics and Mathematics and Chemistry. This aspect makes them the best suited students who can be encouraged to study these basic sciences, something essential to help them compete better in global research initiatives in nanotechnology, software and communications. The world is witnessing revolutionary growth in these areas, and IITs have so far lagged behind due to lack of serious initiatives and of course lack of suitable funding and right people.

To summarize, I believe an IIT degree is not a passport to success, and hence distributing it to people who don't deserve it on merit is meaningless. IITs suffer from the lack of world class facilities, depleting faculty standards and cash crunch: problems that need to be addressed before any more new schools are named as IITs. Perhaps the IITs need to come out of government control and then attract funding from everywhere to transform themselves into schools that really produce the best engineers and researchers. Lastly, as alumni we owe it to our alma mater to guide its policy changes, and help IITs become leaders in research and development of the world.