It's been called "the biggest Indian brand after the Taj Mahal”. Its famous alumni have powered innovation in Silicon Valley, run the biggest companies and shaped tech indices.
It's even part of popular American culture as epitomised by the geek Asok in Dilbert who claims he is "mentally superior to most people on earth”. In case you're still wondering, we are talking about the IITs, whose students know unfathomables like Doppler's effect and Hess's law and have cracked what is arguably the toughest undergraduate examination in the world..
So what happens when what is perhaps India's best-known global brand — as represented by the existing seven IITs — goes from producing just a few thousand IITians to many, many more.
Is it like a designer label gone pret, accessible to all but special to none? Many academicians and alumni are convinced that is the fate in store if institutes with inadequate infrastructure and lack of quality teachers sprout up across the country.
As per the government's proposals, eight new IITs are going to come up in Rajasthan, Bihar, Andhra, Himachal, Gujarat, Orissa, MP and Punjab while the institute at BHU will be converted into a IIT as well. All this adds up to a grand total of 16. Not too grand, however, as the new IIT in Andhra, for instance, will operate out of an old DRDO lab in Medak.
Bhamy Shenoy, who is from the pioneer batch of IIT-Madras, calls it a strategic blunder. "It is a mistake to bring new institutions under the IIT umbrella. In fact, the government made a mistake when it established the new institute in Assam for political reasons. But one isn't such a problem, eight institutes are another matter. It is just not possible to manage 16 IITs under bureaucratic control as envisaged and have uniformly high standards," he says.
Standards that those who have been to independent India's first professional institution — conceived and built by Indians for the unique developmental needs of a free India — swear by. After all, which other institute's entrance exam makes you swot so hard that you forget to eat, sleep, party, and culminates in a three-hour gruelling torture that pits you against toppers from every conceivable school in the country. In an interview to CBS, Narayana Murthy said his son had to go to Ivy League Cornell only after he failed to get admission in IIT. In this year's JEE, 3.22 lakh students competed for a mere 4,193 seats — that's 77 students for one seat as against Harvard's eight.
What follows after JEE isn't a cakewalk either, says a mechanical engineer from IIT-Delhi who is set to pass out next year. "We are expected to do a sufficient ‘amount' of work. Ten assignments of appropriate difficulty (read tough as hell) in a 14-week schedule in a semester other than the course load, along with two minor exams and a major exam. Throw in some lab demos and three-four quizzes and that's bootcamp." At the end of it though, he will probably be part of an elite IIT club, nay clan.
For Arjun Malhotra, CEO of global consultancy firm Headstrong, IIT is "special because of the colleagues I met there and the friendships I made."
Malhotra passed out from IIT-Kharagpur and went on to set up HCL with six friends. Committed teachers are as much the strength of IIT as smart students, he points out. And that's precisely why faculty shortage is a key issue with new IITs coming up. "I think we will get smart students. But unless we can motivate more smart youngsters to become teachers, there is going to be a problem, not just for IITs but for everyone else in higher education."
The existing IITs are already unable to maintain the ideal student-teacher ratio. At IIT-Delhi for instance, there are 556 faculty positions of which only 420 have been filled. Once 27% reservation is implemented and the number of seats increases, IIT-D director Surendra Prasad says 800-plus faculty members will be required.
"It's not just about recruiting people, it has to be quality faculty. Not any PhD will do, the PhD has to have research potential as well as great interest in teaching," says Prasad. Quite a tall order, thanks to unattractive pay scales.
In this scenario, does it make sense to set up more IITs? Anoop Kumar, technical lead/architect at Tufts University who gives the credit for all his achievements to IIT-Kharagpur, says, "There are not enough funds for infrastructure and the IITs are unable to lure faculty. So instead of creating new institutes, we should focus on current IITs. The quality of research has to be improved."
But not everyone is worried about Brand IIT losing its sheen. "There were five IITs when our population was under 500 million; today, in keeping with demand, there should be many more. But obviously the creation of an IIT requires maintaining certain standards, notably the quality of faculty and research and pedagogical facilities. If they are below par, that would certainly dilute the brand, but there is no reason why that should occur if the right level of resources and international collaboration is provided," says writer Shashi Tharoor.
But wouldn't it have made more sense to create another brand? "Creating a new brand is difficult while creating a brand extension — or in this case a location variant — is easy. It won't affect the basic equity of the mother brand so long as quality of education is maintained," says brand consultant Harish Bijoor. Nothing to worry about in the short term but in the long term, a fall in standards could impact the global brand that is IIT.
Says Bhamy Shenoy: "Brand IIT will be diluted and individual IITs will end up becoming brands. Today, it doesn't matter whether a student is from IIT-Madras or IIT-Bombay. But in the future, people would want to know which IIT a student is from." The new IITs are being set up almost 50 years after the original ones but will this generation gap also snowball into a quality gap? Only the skills of India's future technologists will tell.
