5,000 IITians coming to town

WASHINGTON, DC: Brace yourself for the attack of the alpha geeks. Between December 23 and 25, more than five thousand of the world’s brightest technologists, engineers, physicists, mathematicians and managers will converge upon the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay campus in Powai to attend the fourth Global IIT Alumni Conference, possibly making Mumbai the world’s brainiest city for that period.

Called PanIIT 2006, the event is not your run-of-the-mill alumni gathering. President APJ Abdul Kalam will speak to the IIT graduates in a keynote speech, a tradition begun by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, the keynote speaker at the first conference in California in 2003. The closing address will be given by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while spirituality guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is slated to host a session on bringing technology and spirituality, while UN Undersecretary Shashi Tharoor will also present a lecture on Day Two of the conference on December 24.

The event comes just two months after the IITs came in at No 3 in the global ranking of technology institutes created by the London-based Times Higher Education supplement. Says TA Balasubramanian, head of PanIIT 2006’s media committee and a chemical engineering graduate from IIT-Bombay’s batch of 1975, “We have been at work on this from July 2005.”

Tabby, as he prefers to be called, says that while the biggest participating country will be India, there will be 500 IIT graduates from the US who have registered to come down to India. “A large number of delegates are also expected from Singapore, Australia, UK and other European countries such as France, Belgium, Netherlands and Germany,” he says.

The primary theme for this year’s conference is nation-building, with segments such as ‘How to make India a knowledge economy’, ‘How to lift millions of people out of poverty in just one generation’ and ‘How to present India as a global brand’.

There will be follow-up too, says Tabby, who owns a Mumbai-based public relations company MaxiGen. “Certain projects are taken up by PanIIT as special projects,” he says. “We have a dedicated person per segment playing the role of a catalyst who sits through the sessions of that segment and note the action items and decisions taken for implementation. These will be summarised and presented to the prime minister on the last day.”

The catalyst will be responsible for these action items until the time groups are formally set up to take these initiatives ahead up and PanIIT’s success will be measured based on the number of projects taken forward. For instance, this year’s projects include a Rs50 crore Knowledge Initiative in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology to create rural technologies; Pi-Fort, the Pan-IIT Foundation for Rural Transformation; and Pi-Foci, the Pan IIT Future of Computing Initiative).

Of course, it’s not just all work and no play. On the second day, says Tabby, Shah Rukh Khan is expected to perform at the ‘Bollywood Nite’ event. Combined with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s lecture, “We are aiming at enhancing innovation and creativity through achieving better work-life balance.”

Perhaps that’s how they become IIT graduates in the first place.