Problems inherent in creating new IITs
Shreesh Chaudhary
Having an IIT is like having a flower garden on one’s premises. It gives beauty to the place. But the owner gets little of immediate use. IITs are yet to have quotas for the local kids. Since the 1990s, even their supporting jobs are mostly outsourced. The only thing an IIT brings to the local community is the imaginary joy of having a flower garden.
IIT Kharagpur is perhaps most appropriately located – a former jail yard next to a big railway yard and an abandoned airfield of the Second World War vintage put to better use. But at Delhi, Kanpur, Mumbai and Chennai, it has taken far costlier square inches, which, left to any other use, including as pasture land, as some of them were, would give the local community much more. Excepting IIT Roorkee and IIT Guwahati, the existing IITs are the products of the deliberations of a specialist committee set up for this purpose. The creation of new IITs could have benefited from the experience of the existing ones. But new IITs, in Hyderabad, Patna, Jaipur and Ahmedabad, are coming up almost entirely under political pressure and a popular sense of local glory. No consultation of any kind, no discussion by a parliamentary or ministerial committee, no reference to an experts committee, nothing of the kind of public consultation has preceded the creation of the new IITs. Yet students and a temporary campus have been found in a hurry for IIT-H. Faculty, for the present, will fly there from Chennai. Other new IITs may begin working in a similar manner by 2009.
A populist act
The states where these IITs are being created are among the educationally most deprived. Bihar has a literacy rate of under 40 per cent. Andhra, Rajasthan and Gujarat are not much better. They could have sought central help for more and better provided schools, colleges, industrial training institutes, regional engineering and medical colleges, etc. This way they could have got more of substance and lasting value, just as a not-very-affluent family does from a kitchen garden in the backyard.
There is the problem of finding faculty. Existing IITs are already between thirty and forty per cent understaffed. IIT Madras should have about 600 faculty members. It has just over 400. Here teacher to student ratio used to be one to twenty until the early 1990s. Just now it is over one to forty. Recent hike in reservations would further change this ratio adversely. And then IIT-M would have to baby sit IIT-H. How thin can we spread!
It is not that the country does not have enough people with the required qualification. But they prefer MNCs and BPOs or teaching and researching abroad, at far better salaries. To create several more IITs without any change in the manner of recruitments and admissions and without even the motion of consultation with the existing IITs is a populist act for very short term political gains and without least regard to the future of the IIT system. One wonders if IITs as world class institutions can survive these changes.
Then there is the problem of huge costs involved in creating so many IITs together and suddenly. Without these facilities the new IITs may not attract interested and deserving students and faculty. At 2008 examination for entrance to IITs, even the lowest ranking students have shown extreme reluctance in accepting seats at IIT-H. A government genuinely interested in creating opportunities may first want to invest in primary education. It may also invest in creating quality institutions in other streams, such as humanities and sciences. Technological education can better be left to the private sector which has created many institutions of a standard unimaginable some decades ago. Most government colleges, including those in technological education, continue to be under-provided. Many students and teachers have no access to internet, library, laboratory and other curricular and other facilities. Not to find money for them and to create some more IITs serves no justifiable purpose. Neither does it create an IIT, except in name.
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