System upgrade

Close on the heels of the human resource development ministry giving the green signal for the Indian Institutes of Management to set up campuses abroad,comes another welcome move. The proposal to set up an Indian Institute of Technology campus in Qatar is reported to have been given the all clear by the ministry. From student exchanges to those of faculty and new revenue models,these foreign outposts could revitalise the Indian core. And given how many students,in India and increasingly abroad,want the benefit of an IIT education,more campuses serve a larger social good.

The IITs decision to think global is one of many radical ways in which they are redefining themselves. The IITs are good at producing world-class engineers who can compete with the best anywhere else in the world. Yet,there has been over time criticism that the institutes are,in contrast,not that effective in producing scholars and thinkers who can test the boundaries of their discipline. It has also been felt that the IITs and Indian academia in general could benefit from more expansive liberal arts departments. In a concerted bid to address this,the IITs have ramped up their humanities studies,investing money,professors and resources into expanding in this direction. The IITs are perhaps in a better position to fast-track proposals for reform and innovation the kind of changes,for instance,that could put them on a trajectory covered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States,from being a good engineering college to a broad-based centre of learning and research.

With Kapil Sibal signalling his openness to creative thinking,

institutions of higher education have a great opportunity to make up for the stagnation of past decades. It is therefore hoped that the IITs appetite for expansion will have a contagion effect.