Opinion

The Road To Reformation

Let us try and give the students not just the IIT brand but a real education.

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The Road To Reformation
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Opening new IITs, to my mind, will not affect the quality of students. We have enough good students to fill these seats. From the 1400 or so that were admitted in my time (1965), I do believe that the top 25,000 or more today have similar potential and this number will keep growing as more and more young people finish high school. Also, if you look at the profile of the students today in the IITs, they are not from Public Schools/Convents or the big metros. A large majority comes from smaller towns and this is a welcome trend.

What we need is to evolve an education loan system. The recent reports about two brothers and their poor father not being able to raise money for their admission and the HRD minister having to step in and give special grants is not a long term solution.  Education at the IITs consists of admission costs (security deposits, laptop, books etc) + Tuition fees +room rent + mess (food) bills + some decent living expenses for books, stationery etc. Today only the tuition and room rent are covered by bank loans. We need a comprehensive package with low interest rates, (Education is, after all, a national priority) that the student pays off once he starts working.

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Possibly 10 per cent of the consulting income of the IITs should be put into a scholarship endowment fund for that IIT. We need aggressive and innovative solutions to make sure the aspirations of each student who gets through the JEE is met.

Infrastructure takes time to come up. My suggestion is that we should decide the location and the land before the announcement. We should also finalise the temporary premises for them to operate till their campus is ready. The Director and some of the other key positions should be in place while the planning is going on so they have ownership of this. Enable them to work quickly and efficiently by giving them necessary powers as you would to someone who is starting something new.

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Creating an institution requires very different skills than running an institution. If we are very worried about corruption, give them some strong accounting and audit people with a brief to help make things happen within the rules and not just be spoilers. Let us try and give the students not just the IIT brand but a real education and an enjoyable time while they are there.

Faculty has been and will be a problem and unless we can get good teachers. The students will be more intelligent than their teachers and will have little respect for them. We need to find a way to pay more for good professors. Giving them a piece of their consulting income is one solution. Prof. Farrokh Mistry (IIT Kharagpur alumnus and Dean of a University in the US) had come up with Plan FFF (Faculty For the Future). This and more such plans should be encouraged and implemented. Like the telecom and IT industries have started pulling engineers back from the US (Brain Gain) we must find a way to get faculty back from the US and other overseas countries. An additional thought is to have scientists from CSIR and other Labs come and teach and have IIT faculty do a stint at the Lab. This cross fertilisation will encourage a stronger research mindset in both the labs and the IITs.

The old IITs who have land, are being “upgraded” to full Universities. You must have read about IIT Kharagpur starting a Medical College and Hospital by 2017. While this could be a positive development, there has been little or no thought to evolving the governance structure that these new University entities would require. Using the present structure in other Universities in India is probably a formula for failure.

Another key issue is that today IIT is a brand. This is unlike the University of California (UC) system where UCLA or UC Berkeley or UC Santa Cruz are the brands. With the proliferation of IITs, unless we can maintain the present high level of performance of the students and faculty, campuses would become brands and the brand IIT would get diluted. Again not enough thought and discussion seems to have been given to this.

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The JEE (Joint entrance Exam) has been a key to the success of the IITs and making sure that only merit was the criteria for admission. It should not be interfered with. However, the preparatory classes that have come up seem to be able to train candidates to “beat” this. I would like to see the IITs make the exam more unpredictable and get innovative in doing this. This would make these preparatory classes less relevant and ensure that not just the intelligent but the innovative and intelligent students get admission.

(Arjun Malhotra is a co-founder of the HCL Group and former chairman and CEO of Headstrong.  He is an IIT Kharagpur alumnus)

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