26 May 2006
To
The Honourable Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam,
The President of India
Rashtrapati Bhavan
New Delhi,
India-110 011.
Respected Sir,
As members of the faculty of IIT Kanpur, an institution that is rated among thebest technical universities in the country, we are appalled by the proposedpolicy of caste-based reservation for other backward castes (OBCs) that is beingsought to be implemented in this and other IITs. We are committed to nationbuilding and wish to contribute to make India an equitable and just society.However, we believe that such move at the present stage will be very injuriousto the IITs. It will have devastating consequences to the culture of excellencecultivated over half-a-century by generations of dedicated and knowledgeableteachers and tens of thousands of brilliant students of all castes, creeds andlinguistic and ethnic groups.
The undergraduate students of IIT Kanpur do not usually, or even often, comefrom wealthy and privileged backgrounds. The vast majority come from the smallermetropolises like Kanpur, Patna and Allahabad, or cities like Bareilly, and themoffusil towns and villages of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. A typical example is thelate SatyendraK Dubey, an IITK alumnus, whose murder in 2003 while working on the NationalHighway project got national media attention. He came from a small village inBihar.
Most IIT Kanpur students thus overcome poverty, bad schools, and many adversecircumstances to compete in a gruelling entrance examination for the right to behere. Many of these students also belong to OBCs; how many, we cannot say,because the admission is blind to caste and indeed to every other criterionexcept ability. Thus the distinguishing mark of IIT students is not wealth,privilege, or birth, but dedication and talent.
Into such an environment the introduction of privileges accruing only to membersof particular castes would be a travesty. Further, with no objective criteriayet laid down for defining backwardness, such privileges will seemingly begranted in perpetuity. This would be the very image of the caste discriminationof the past centuries that the policy purports to assuage. Past injusticescannot be redressed by further injustices perpetrated today. Backwardness is notdetermined by caste alone. It is clear for all to see that other factors likepoverty, region and gender have greater adverse impact on the chances of aperson becoming an engineer or a doctor. It therefore seems to us that, exceptin electoral terms, purely caste-based reservations make no rational sense.
However the point we wish to make here is not to argue for one set of criteriafor reservations over others. Rather it is to argue that the best institutionsin India should be the preserves of excellence, with proven performance as theironly selection criterion. Such institutions serve to develop the"seed-corn" of the nation which can then be planted elsewhere to makethe whole nation grow in strength and prosperity. Therefore think not of IITstudents in terms of their castes, but of them only as India's best hope, as thefuture leaders of India who have been nurtured in an environment where onlyexcellence matters, not caste, creed or ethnic origin.
This emphasis on merit must not be viewed wrongly as ivory-tower elitism in acountry of millions of poor and deprived people. Rather it is a necessarystrategy for ensuring that developing India soon catches up with the developednations of the world, so that, in the long run the IITs are instrumental toraising the standard of life of all Indians, and shine forth as exemplars ofdevelopment and emancipation in an environment of extreme challenges.
Even if Government insists on affirmative action programs for IITs, we are surethat the IITs can be trusted to evolve and implement such programs bythemselves. After all, IIT Kanpur has had an exemplary record of implementingthe SC/ST reservation in a supportive and pro-active way that became a model forall IITs. Such an approach to affirmative action will also be in keeping withthe autonomous status given us by Parliament. We share the concern of thegovernment for providing the young generation with good education and economicprospects. In fact, many of us, and our students, spend time in schooleducation, health, and rural developmental projects outside our busy schedules.We could participate in major ways in innovative research in education, health,and grassroots work, and thus contribute significantly to affirmative action.
It would be most disastrous to impose a 27.5% quota on the IITs in an ostensibly"fair way" by increasing the number of seats. This would mean rapidlyincreasing the seats substantially. In recent years we have doubled our intake.So the IITs are already short of faculty, as few applicants meet our exactingstandards of academic excellence. If a sudden increase of faculty is imposed onus by a drastic increase of seats, the entire academic standing of the IITs willbe compromised, and they will go the way of so many universities before them.
Many institutions in India now have good undergraduate programs, but only veryfew other than the IITs can train students in the highly specialised engineeringand scientific skills required in India if it is to become a developed country.So there has been a concerted effort in the IIT system to shift our focus topost-graduate education and to creating an excellent research environment. Thiswas the direction provided by the IIT review committee and Government over thelast decade. To this end we have been working hard to increase postgraduateintake and provide more time to faculty for research. A drastic increase inundergraduate strength will derail this effort indefinitely.
The IITs preserved their excellence over the decades when university afteruniversity fell prey to politics, corruption and inertia. At this moment, whenthe entire nation is on the verge of take-off to becoming a major economicpower, when multinational companies are shifting their research and developmentcentres to India because of the vast technical manpower here, let us not playwith these great institutions and cripple them in the hour of their greatestutility.
We request you to reconsider the reservation policy, and do everything you canto preserve the IITs for the future generations of India and, indeed, for thevery future of our country. Of all the educational institutions in India, theIITs have remained true to the mission assigned to them by Pandit Nehru. So letthem remain free to flourish as the standard bearers of Indian science andtechnology which was, and should remain, their primary purpose.
Yours very respectfully,
the undersigned faculty of IIT Kanpur
(signed by 125 faculty members by department and title)
