In his Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced the setting up of eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and seven new Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). None can doubt that this is a perfectly laudable intention. In a country of more than a billion people, it is surely ridiculous that every year, only about 3,500 students gain admission into the seven existent IITs, and about 1,500 into the six IIMs. Yes, some institutes of higher education should remain exclusive, to maintain their unwavering commitment to excellence, but at these numbers, the size of this club can be easily expanded considerably without sacrificing either exclusivity or excellence, and offer access to fine and world-respected education to many more talented and deserving young men and women.
But the trouble starts now. States will begin lobbying to have an IIT or an IIM allotted to them. Logic will be replaced by negotiation and quid pro quos. The key issue which will be forgotten is that IITs and IIMs cannot offer the education they promise without having strong industry linkages. In both engineering and management, a significant part of the course work needs to be done in real situations, that is, interacting with and working for real companies, solving real problems. Already news reports suggest that the states will be selected on the basis of “their economic and social status”. This, in Indian politics, means that the poorer or less industrialised the state is, the higher the chances it will get an IIT or an IIM. This will be totally counter-effective.
These institutes need industry around them, otherwise the education is incomplete. They need good infrastructure around them to attract high-class faculty. Someone in the Government should study the track records of IIM Kozhikode and IIT Guwahati and compare them to those of their brethren. States believe that IITs and IIMs create employment. But by themselves, they create very few jobs, maybe a few thousand at the very most. And there is absolutely no reason for industry to gravitate to a state because it has one of these institutes. Allotting these schools of higher learning to states on the basis of “economic and social status” will be a totally wasted effort.
Also, merely increasing the number of IITs and IIMs is hardly going to solve the real problem. The IIT and IIM systems already suffer from an acute shortage of high-class faculty. With...
