Privileges of studying in an IIT

Upset with a fee hike, IIT Bombay students are staging protests. Not just IIT Bombay, walk into any IIT campus and you will be assailed by a steady whine about facilities, stipends and fees. Most of it would be true.

Let’s get a perspective. In 2011, the Anil Kakodkar committee had recommended a tuition fee hike up to Rs 2.25 lakh per student to cover only the operational costs of IITs. “This would be reasonable considering the high demand for IIT graduates and the salary that an IIT BTech is expected to get,” it observes.

The ever-expanding IITs — the Narendra Modi government has announced six more in addition to the eight launched by UPA-II and the seven older IITs — have not just capital and other non-operational costs to meet, but also the mandate to teach and promote research, and research is an extremely expensive affair.

In 2013, another panel led by a former director of IIT Bombay, Ashok Misra, recommended a tuition fee of Rs 3 lakh. The Ministry of Human Resources Development was hesitant to implement this hike. Eventually, last year, the ministry approved an all-inclusive fee of around Rs 2 lakh. Compare this with private engineering institutes of repute that charge anything upwards of Rs 3 lakh without offering half the quality of education that an IIT does.

Sure, the IITs cannot compete with a Massachusetts Institute of Technology in its student spend or research facilities, but then, that would be a fallacious and unfair comparison. The IITs offer the best faculty and facilities in the country which no private institution cares to or can afford to offer. It hand-holds students with scholarships, loans, waivers and subsidies that actually defeats the purpose of an omnibus fee hike.

In return for a lavish platter of gains, IIT graduates are expected to merely study well. Many of them famously go abroad for higher studies or better jobs. Even though the number of IITians travelling abroad has declined in recent years, more than 60,000 IITians are said to live in the US alone.

The much-berated brain drain is also a strain on our exchequer. This year’s allocation takes the budget for all IITs to Rs 7,856 crore, an increment of Rs 2,400 crore over last year. Nothing has been done to discontinue the unfair advantage enjoyed by higher education at the cost of primary education — Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the flagship central scheme for universalisation of school education, has been given Rs 23,500 crore, up by just Rs 1,000 crore from last year. Why is the HRD Ministry hesitant to downsize its investment in the IITs or even to hike its fees to make them self-sustainable?

While the answer is not clear, it would be worthwhile for IITians to be made soundly aware how their expensive education is funded. It’s only partly funded by their pockets. The Kakodkar committee observes that a fee of Rs 2.25 lakh, which would be applicable to paying students alone, would take care of just about 30 per cent of what an IIT spends on a student. The rest comes from the ordinary taxpayer of the country.

The HRD Ministry and IITs need to effectively and aggressively engage with the students and communicate that the fee hike is well deserved, and sensitise them to the debt they owe the country as a whole. After all, what they receive is evidently more valuable than what, or how much ever, they give back.

That brings us to the second part of the issue. As alumni, IITians are exemplary donors. But most IIT alumni channel all their largesse to their alma mater. IIT Bombay, for instance, sponges up donations of about Rs 200 crore in a decade. While the sentiment of giving back is well taken, most alumni take a rather narrow view of their obligations. Of course, there are alumni who have committed to the development of the country and contributed significantly with their innovations just as there are alumni who donate to other causes outside the pearly gates of IITs.

That percentage, however, is small. Most alumni fail to think beyond the IITs for their donations. It’s time they are made to realise that what they take back with them is not just the best education, laboratories, and facilities the country can afford, but also a sense of entitlement that comes from being an IITian and that brings the world to their doors.

The author is a senior journalist and a communications consultant