IITs HAVE SLIPPED

IITs’ve Somehow Slipped into Comfort Zone
As one of the top National Research Professors, Dr. Goverdhan Mehta is a member of the Prime Minister’s scientific advisory council and heads the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) too.

A veteran IIT and IISc faculty, Mehta says India’s top technology institutes need to revamp urgently if india wants to catch up with the developed economies where innovation culture is established. He also asks companies like Infosys to build stronger industry-academia links.

"On unemployability of Indian graduates ...

I am more worried about our general purpose, bachelor degree programs. It’s a burning issue; I do not believe we have tried enough to understand the magnitude of this issue. The government is looking to recharge the higher education system, create new regulatory framework, and also at the same time reform and rejuvenate the existing system. So, all this is in the right direction. The problem is that we are going to touch 20% GER (Gross Enrolment Ratio) and have ambition to cross 30% GER, closer to the developed nations. If that ambition is to be realised, we will be producing more than 5-6 million general purpose graduates.

You increase the GER and therefore more and more graduates who have no disciplinary capabilities and skill sets. We have this large pool of young, ambitious people, who in their own ways have strived hard, but how do we empower them to create a future for themselves?

Somebody has to bring about a complete change, and reengineer the system. On Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy questioning the quality of IITs’ engineering grads ... I don’t think we have understood the magnitude of problem. The problem is not only with giving them employing them but also with training. If you do not inculcate the ability to think out of the box, it is going to be difficult.

IITs in my view have somehow slipped into comfort zone because they are recognised to be very good by their products. There is also, in my view, some problem with the leadership. The problem is not specific to IITs, there are large number of corporate and government entities that do not have proper leadership on top.

IITs need a very strong mentorship programme. We have enough people in our country who have great experience and a vision for the future who can be mentors. So, I think IITs have to do a considerably enhanced work, in terms of research output and the innovation that they do.

Comparing IITs with MIT and other global peers ...

Lot of innovation comes from people of Indian origin but not necessarily from Indian education. We need to differentiate between a successful Indian working in different parts of world creating waves and people doing the same in our institutions. We need to accelerate the process of change.

You can’t compare MITs with IITs. MIT budget is IIT budget multiplied by 10. But if you are an innovator, you know it very well that we can achieve many things with less inputs. Their achievements should be projected not only among the engineers , but everybody. How do we know about MIT?

MIT doesn’t go and publicise, but everybody knows their about their achievements through their innovations and inventions.

On what it will take to create an ecosystem like Stanford or MIT at an Indian tech hub ...

The element for this has to be the vision, leadership and the time. In my view, we have all the other things. If we want that ecosystem, we need to create that energy in the environment. Our IIT graduates, when they go abroad for summer internships, in three months they are able to do remarkable innovations. IITs have been moving in that direction, but not enough.
(ET15D1211)