What other areas interest you?
Adult literacy is one. The government had a very major programme in removing literacy. It required 200 hours of instruction. It required trained teachers. The first problem is, where do I find so many hours to be given. Secondly, if the illiteracy is largely in rural areas, then 500,000 villages means at least those many teachers. Where do you find so many teachers to go and settle in rural areas?
Then some of my friends and I, along with professor P N Murthy, started a project on human cognitive systems. I studied human cognitive systems, I studied the process of how , we recall, how we retain. I came to a conclusion that we retain things by a combination of audio and video. What we said was why do we have to teach alphabets? We would start of by teaching words. What is our objective? It was that a literate person should be able to read a newspaper. So then came what size of vocabulary you need to read a newspaper. For an English daily, I could read with a vocabulary of 600 to 700 words.
The idea was to trim that down to 500 words. We did the first pilot at a village outside Hyderabad. In eight weeks, people in the village could read newspapers, though not fluently. Then we did in Guntur district in Andhra Pradesh. I think Guntur is now totally literate. The women there have started asking their political representatives to give in writing what they promised, because those women could read. This method has been accepted in National Literacy Mission and they added writing to it.
Now the good thing about it is that all these lessons are put in CD ROMs. You load it on the PC and then you won’t even need a teacher, it is so user-friendly. Our way of making a person literate took even less than Rs 100. It has worked. Some countries like South Africa and other African countries have taken this model back. Actually Zanele Dlamini Mbeki (wife of former South African president Thabo Mbeki) came to see this. She went to Hyderabad to see the pilots. She came back convinced.
Then we have done something about engineering education that came out of professor U R Rao’s report — that we are not producing enough engineering Phds and that there is not enough innovation. Then the question was what kind of people are suitable for research. Some of us felt that a person who comes out of IIT goes abroad, does his Phd in four years.
Why do people here take six to eight years to complete it? A simple conclusion was that the quality of people in this country is very good but we are not preparing them in basic sciences like mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology. The IITs are good in basic sciences. They produce 3,500 to 4,000 graduates out of which 2,000 go abroad and do not come back. Another 500-600 go for MBAs. So we are not left with many on a scale that we would like to go for Phds. So we proposed to some of my colleagues who studied the issue.
We found that autonomy is required for some colleges to do this. Maharashtra had seven or eight colleges which came in the category of ‘good’, which had an 85% admission cut-off level for marks. The Maharashtra government had taken out four colleges from the university system —- The College of Engineering, Pune (CoEP), Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, University Department of Chemical technology and Sri Guru Gobind Singh College of Engineering at Nanded. Now we did a total gap analysis between CoEP Pune and IIT Mumbai.
We started looking at their labs and we brought them on a par with IITs. We also got some professors look at their process of education. We also went to the extent of laying dedicated optic fibre link between CoEP and IIT Mumbai so that professors and students could interact live. What has happened is that there is marked improvement in the quality of graduates being produced by CoEP, which now produces 600 of them, The University Department of Chemical Technology in Kalina, Mumbai, produces 400 graduates. So you have added 1,000 straightway to that. The other two will also come up like this.
There are 50 such colleges in India where the focus will now move to. If a Pune prototype is replicated in all those places then you will have 35,000 to 45,000 engineering graduates with the requisite background in basic sciences.
If you have that, you can afford to lose even 10,000. Then for your graduate school be IIT or IISc, you will be left with 15,000 to 20,000 people. Then the fun starts. See, we have an advantage of scale and quality of mind. Just put them to your advantage.
Do you think you would run an organisation that will have all these businesses?
Yes I think I could. Now these have to be marketed.
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