IIT grads for world class — that’s what matters

True to his reputation as a maverick, Jairam Ramesh, our Union minister for environment and forests, has stirred a hornet’s nest by coming out with an unwarranted criticism that the faculty members working at our IITs and IIMs are not world class and only their students can be given that label. For all that, he himself was an alumnus of IIT Bombay in the 1970s.     

If one looks at the situation that obtains at the IITs alone — the IIMs are not quite the same and so are left out of the present discussion — it will be seen that they have an enviable brand name that sells globally with their graduates getting firmly appointed by leading corporate houses often much before they even complete their degrees. This clearly goes to show that the graduates passing out of the IITs are of very high quality and several hundred IIT alumni are doing extremely well at home and abroad which is proof-enough that they are world-class. 

There cannot be two opinions about the fact that only the very best among the students make it to the portals of the IITs — their joint entrance examination (JEE) is so tough that it filters out 98% of those who take it and lets in only about 2% of them. This screening, cruel as it is on the vast majority of the aspirants, is one of the many factors that contribute to the glory that these institutes are able to cover themselves with. 

However, unless these brilliant students are put through their paces properly, they will not get the benefit of studying in an IIT and become world-class products and this is precisely what the IIT faculty members accomplish quietly and without any fanfare.

These professors have all been drawn mostly from the talent available in the universities and colleges in the country with very few from the crop of local alumni since the IITs do not encourage ‘inbreeding’ as they call it. There is no special training institute for producing top-class faculty for the IITs and degrees in education like BEd and MEd are not among the eligibility criteria for them.

Still, after joining the IITs, these professors get into the grooves quickly and imbibe the unique IIT academic structure which makes all the difference between the IITs and other educational institutions remarkably well. They are responsible for moulding raw brilliance into a commodity readily acceptable to the international market and this is no mean achievement.

As for the IIT faculty not being able to churn out research papers in such an abundance as for instance their Chinese counterparts, the reason is to be found in the very objective of these institutes — they are not really meant to be research centres of excellence because their primary responsibility is to conduct all the courses in various disciplines well to enable the students to acquire the requisite skill in them. In the IITs the professors do get free time to devote to research but they have to still teach a specified number of hours per week. And preparing a research paper and getting it published in a journal takes a long time and so they cannot be asked to do the impossible — be devoted teachers and also prolific researchers. It is only in the exclusive research laboratories/centres/institutes where there is no teaching work to be done that the scientists can hope to publish a large number of ‘papers’. Therefore to hold their inadequate quantum of research publications against them and because of it, declare them as less than world-class is grossly unfair.

What matters in the ultimate analysis is the quality of the graduates who pass out from the IITs and this is still world-class.

It does not make any difference whatsoever if the IITs do not figure in the first 100 or 150 institutions in the world because there are several factors that contribute to an institute acquiring a high rank. In the US, UK, Europe and several other foreign countries, IIT alumni hold the flag of their alma mater pretty high and are respected by their employers. Therefore it will make more sense to savour this privilege than indulge in unnecessary self-criticism, which is bound to prove detrimental.

— The writer is a former professor of geology, IIT-Bombay