Rad Links

 IITs are in trouble. The human resource development ministry has initiated a brilliant pincer movement that first seeks to control and then to destroy them. If reports are to be believed, and given the kite flying taking place at the HRD ministry I will reserve my judgment till it actually happens, India will have at least 19 Indian Institutes of Technology pretty soon and maybe 30 within the next few years.

It reminds me of Jagmohan Dalmiya’s coup against the establishment in 1996. To break the stranglehold of Australia and England over the International Cricket Council, Dalmiya effectively bypassed the established Test-playing countries and focused on winning over the associate members.

Dalmiya offered a share of glory to countries like Canada, Bermuda and Ireland. Cricket would be played on their grounds, as neutral venues between traditional enemies, or as stopovers. More of them will get a chance to play in the World Cup. They would also get a share of the global TV rights. Dalmiya smashed the establishment 25-13. Oh yes, by the way, the associate members had one vote each while the Test-playing countries had two votes each.

The same thing is going to happen with the IITs. Functional autonomy, and by definition, a protection from the perverse mindset of our politicians, is one of the key pillars of the IITs. The newly set up IITs are going to provide the HRD ministry with the democratic votes and moral position in an enlarged IIT Council, like Canada and Bermuda did to Dalmiya, that will drive one regressive law after another to finally reduce the original “big 5” IITs to a totally hopeless and supine position.

I may, of course, be paranoid and imagining conspiracy theories.

The entire exercise may actually be driven by the noble intention of maximising the value of brand IIT. If we could get 2000 IIT-ians out and then expand it to 4000 IIT-ians, why can’t we have a hundred IITs with a thousand students each? In a country of a billion people, what’s wrong with 10000 IIT-ians passing out each year?

To begin with, it blows apart the core value of brand IIT: super brains.

An IIT-ian friend of mine once went out for an arranged date with an air hostess in Hong Kong. As the music changed gears, the air hostess kept asking him to dance with her and my friend kept declining with a polite, “I can’t do the twist/disco/cha-cha-cha.” Finally, the air hostess lost her cool and is reported to have demanded, “What? You can’t even do the Can-Can? What can you do?”

To which, the proud IIT-ian responded, “I can do second order partial differential equations; can you?”

Brand IIT is not about IITs; it’s about IIT-ians. And, mostly, it is about undergraduate IIT-ians at that. People who have done M-Tech from IITs always feel discriminated against. Since they never cracked the JEE, there’s no way they will be accepted into the tribe.

Brilliance is elitist. There is a difference between brilliance and above average. The IIT entrance exam, the JEE, was designed to shock and awe and separate the brilliant from the above average. There is a difference between JEE rank 500 and 50,000.

If we end up producing 50,000 IIT-ians every year, we would, most certainly, be killing brand IIT.

IITs as institutions would have crumbled to meet the demands of the HRD ministry which has never been known to appreciate brilliance.

I may be wrong here too. The thinking in the HRD ministry may just be going along these lines: “We need to increase the learning experience of the average student. To do so, we need to increase the comprehension and retention. What better way than to send all of them to IIT? If there are only seven IITs right now, let’s create a hundred more!”

IITs are not able to attract quality professors because their salaries are controlled by AICTE/GoI — 15,667/249-987/22,098 is not exactly the type of pay scale that people will be lining up for.

No quality professors and JEE 50,000 ranked students; it’s a mix destined to kill brand IIT. In fact, it’s a college outside Erode in Tamil Nadu.

Believe it or not, I may be unfair, or wrong, here too.

They may be setting up the new IITs as the model learning institutes, unparalleled in the world. We may be seeing the use of technology in the classroom, the like of which we have not seen till now.

The new IITs may have classrooms where each student has access to video-on-demand lectures; where each student has access to web X.0 features of collaborative learning; where all labs are digital; where all students use technology to pace their learning to be in tune with their individual learning speeds.

Chances are that such colleges will not be called IITs. These will be the challengers to the IITs.

Someday, the government will realise that it makes more sense to concentrate on primary education and to get out of higher education. Someday, it will disband the UGC and allow private players into higher education with no strings attached. Someday, there will be an engineering college that will challenge the existing IITs. Someday, the private colleges will use technology to deliver learning 2.0 to students. Someday, private engineering colleges will emerge, with entrance exams, personality tests and learning methodologies that will leave the IITs behind. And the challengers will arise. And the IITs will have to learn to compete.

The writer is the head of Global Branding at Infosys. The views expressed here are his own express@expressindia.com