The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Virtual IIT is "essential"

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 22, 2006
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Virtual IIT is "essential"

Staff Reporter

To meet the needs of knowledge economy

— Photo: S. R. Raghunathan

NEW CONCEPT: M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-Madras, delivering the Dr. C.R. Krishnamurthi endowment lecture in Chennai on Tuesday.

CHENNAI: A virtual IIT is essential for meeting the expanding needs of India's knowledge economy, according to M.S. Ananth, Director, IIT-Madras.

Delivering the Dr. C.R Krishnamurthi endowment lecture on `Recontextualising the IITs', he said three times the number of IITs were required to meet the country's needs and they could not be set up overnight. The problem was not so much the infrastructure or funding as the paucity of qualified staff. The shortage was so acute that even if every engineering PhD graduate came back to teach, it would be insufficient. With 45,000 more engineering seats needed, and that number rising exponentially, a new university was needed every week even to maintain the current levels.

In the face of these alarming statistics, Dr. Ananth said, there was no choice except a virtual university. The faculty requirement would be 10 per cent of that needed for brick-and-mortar institutions.

Model cited

He pointed to the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), which provided digital content for 240 engineering courses, as a model that could be scaled up if the All-India Council for Technical Education was interested. The option of using satellites for video-streaming online IIT courses was being explored.

While the NPTEL's first phase cost Rs. 15 crore, it would cost less than Rs. 100 crore to set up a fully-fledged virtual IIT, apart from the cost of running it. On the other hand, a single brick-and-mortar IIT would cost Rs. 750 crore.

He admitted there was no consensus among IIT directors on a virtual IIT, as many felt "face to face" interaction was essential.

However, he insisted that students were actually happy with impersonal teaching. It must be called a virtual "IIT", since only that brand name would carry weight.

Exam reform

Saying examination reform could also be achieved by a virtual IIT, Mr. Ananth said he was trying to recruit what he called his "mafia" — a band of influential IIT alumni holding key positions in government and industry — to promote the concept.

Apart from creating a virtual avatar, the IITs needed to scale up their postgraduate and research programmes.

Mr. Ananth recommended a private-public partnership funding model to raise the money needed for equipment and faculty compensation more in line with industry standards.

Industry collaboration need to go beyond funding to actual participation in projects such as the Research Park that the IIT Madras is setting up.

Corporates would generate 500 adjunct faculty and a thousand research scholars, part-time employment for students and joint research and development initiatives attuned to the current industry needs.

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