Reengineering the IITs
India’s premier
seats of science and tech education are ushering in changes that were once
deemed impossible, and the results are showing
Varun Bhalerao studied electrical engineering at the
Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, but he never expected to return
there to teach. That was because he went on to specialise in astronomy, a field
of study his alma mater then had little interest in. He earned a PhD from
California Institute of Technology, where he studied neutron stars, supernova
explosions and gamma ray bursts, complex celestial matters that held little
interest to the firmly earth-focused IITs. He was proved wrong.
IIT Bombay accepted him readily in early 2017 as its
first astronomer. Within a year, it hired four more astronomers. Although
astronomy is not yet a major teaching programme, research has started in
earnest. Bhalerao is now using the engineering tradition at IIT Bombay to indulge
in one of his passions — building cuttingedge telescopes.
Bhalerao and his team are developing software for
automating an 18-year-old optical telescope at Hanle in Ladakh, the
third-highest observatory in the world. He is also working with the Indian Space
Research Organisation (ISRO) to develop gravitational astronomy counterparts,
an exciting new field within astronomy.
For his telescope-building, Bhalerao works with three
different engineering departments — electrical, mechanical and aerospace. “For
my work,” says Bhalerao, “I have to be a scientist in an engineering
organisation or an engineer in a science organisation.” IITs had science
departments earlier, but they were largely silos working independently of
engineering departments.
Bhalerao’s experience is indicative of changes
sweeping India’s marquee technical education schools. Once hide-hound in their
ways, IITs and the premier Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru are
rethinking their approach to hiring faculty, interdisciplinary research, humanities
and much else, and ushering in a lot of flexibility and methods practiced at
the best science institutions around the world.
This new approach also means they are able to develop
multidisciplinary centres and teams working on some very challenging projects.
Some of these are of strategic importance to the country, some others tackle
fundamental questions in science, while others research problems of interest to
industry. A few also look at the grassroots, working on solutions that could
help the poor. These changes are also manifesting as innovative courses,
departments in new fields and tech startups built in-house.
IIT Bombay is a visible face of this change. “We are
developing a programme to change the format of education,” says IIT Bombay
assistant professor and social scientist Anush Kapadia. “The idea is to burst
the silos.”
Like Bhalerao, social scientist Anush Kapadia may not
have envisioned himself as an IIT professor while pursuing a PhD in
anthropology at New York’s Columbia University. Upon returning to India, he
interviewed with Ashoka University and Premji University, but eventually chose
IIT Bombay. “They took a while to get back,” says Kapadia. Social sciences are
further removed from engineering than astronomy. Once he joined IIT Bombay, he
has started taking an active interest in rethinking what it means to provide an
IIT education.
Across the IITs, there are several professors like
Bhalerao and Kapadia, young researchers who may not have quite fit into an IIT
system as recently as five years ago. Now they are leading the change, in some
ways.
Brain Gain
In the last five years, India has seen a large inflow
of young scientists and engineers, and many of them have made their way into
the best IITs, IISC and other elite institutions. According to data with the
Department of Science and Technology (DST), there was a 70% increase in the
number of fellowships awarded to outstanding young scientists returning from
overseas in the five years after 2012, compared with the five years before 2012.
Many of these young scientists and engineers have joined IITs, IISc and the
emerging Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER).
IIT Madras has been recruiting 25-30 young faculty
for the last five years. IIT Bombay has recruited more than 30 professors a
year since 2012. The newer IITs have been recruiting even more. IISc is hoping
to hire a lot of young faculty over the next few years. The net result—the
average age of researchers in some of India’s elite institutions has come down
from close to 60 in the 1980s to below 40 years now.
A younger faculty also means a different culture at
these institutions. “We were very diffident in the 1980s,” says G Venkatesh,
then an assistant professor of computer science at IIT Bombay and now a professor
of humanities at IIT Madras. “Now the young faculty are very confident and
ambitious. They know that they are on top.”
This means fresh thinking and a bolder vision — they
are now tackling more challenging problems.
At IIT Hyderabad, Nishanth Dongari works on missile
defence systems, and Kiran Kuchi develops 5G technologies. At IIT Bombay,
Bhalerao is trying to create a resurgence of telescope-building in India. Manan
Suri at IIT Delhi, who was chosen this year by MIT Technology Review as one of
35 innovators under 35, develops chips inspired by the structure of the brain.
At IISc, Pramod Kumar is building a system to use super-critical carbon
dioxide. This last one, again, is an illustrative example.
Pramod Kumar joined IISc as an assistant professor in
2012, and immediately started working at a problem unusual for the institute —
developing turbines that use supercritical carbon dioxide, instead of steam.
Turbines driven by supercritical carbon dioxide — a material that is neither
liquid nor gas — requires no water and can be a tenth of the size of
steam-based turbines. It is supposed to be the future in the renewable energy
industry (including in nuclear plants), but developing it is hard.
So far, no commercial product exists. In 2012, IISc
did not have a significant presence in energy research. Now, Kumar has
developed the technology — with assistance from other IISc departments — for
supercritical carbon dioxide, but the turbine is being built.
“Our mandate now is to have a global presence in
technology,” says Kumar.
Research Focus
As the IITs focus more on research, the student
population in the IITs has also been changing in nature, from being
predominantly undergraduate institutions to one being dominated by masters and
PhD students. This is a profound change, quite in keeping with the ambition of
the IITs to become globally-known research institutions. At IIT Delhi, for
example, graduate students now make up 65% of its student population. “Our
research output is going up because of the graduate students,” says IIT Delhi
director Ramgopal Rao. “It is also a reason why our rankings are improving.”
Research output is a major parameter in higher rankings.
As the IITs and the IISc venures into new areas of
research, they are also developing new courses. IIT Bombay is planning new
undergraduate programmes in mathematics, earth science, biology, management,
humanities and social sciences. On the cards is a master’s programme in
film-making. The institute is also considering a master’s programme in fine
arts. Among all these, it is focusing on interdisciplinary research, the single
most important trend sweeping across India’s elite science and technology
institutions.
At IIT Madras, the first interdisciplinary centre —
on combustion research — was seeded in 2014 by the Department of Science and
Technology. Thereafter, formation of such centres have been driven by the
faculty. There are now centres on computational brain research, biological
systems engineering, and data science and artificial intelligence. IIT Madras
organises a grand challenge — a prize of ₹2 crore — every year for proposals for new interdisciplinary
centres.
New centres are going to be formed on energy and
nanomaterials. In the research park built just outside the campus, chemistry
professor T Pradeep is developing a multidisciplinary centre on water that will
look at the topic from start to finish — basic research involving many
disciplines, developing technology, building products, incubating startups, and
manufacturing.
Interdisciplinary Projects
IIT Delhi also organises challenges to push faculty
to form interdisciplinary projects. IISc had its first interdisciplinary centre
on climate change a few years ago. Since then, it has added centres on energy
and water. New centres are being formed on manufacturing and policy. Pramod
Kumar’s supercritical carbon dioxide project is part of the interdisciplinary
centre on energy, and IISc has formed another interdisciplinary centre on
hypersonic flight. But unlike the IITs, IISc does not plan to become a
broad-based institution with strong humanities. “We want to be somewhere in
between Caltech and MIT,” says IISc director Anurag Kumar. Not too small, but
not too big either.
India’s best research institutions differed from the
best in the world in one crucial respect: the mix of academic stars and the
rest. Harvard University, for example, has a few stars that grab a
disproportionate amount of money and projects, and then a large number of
highly competent faculty. Indian institutions have now begun approaching this
mix, in relative terms. “Traditionally the tail had been long and thin in the
IITs,” says IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthy. “It is now changing.”
Some of the IITs have now started pushing students to
think in totally new ways. IIT Madras offers students the option of doing an
interdisciplinary master’s programme when they are in their third year. IIT
Gandhinagar awards a fellowship — called Explorer Fellowship — for six students
every year to go around seven states in the country on a shoestring budget of ₹37,000. The aim of the
fellowship is for the students to experience India in all its diversity, and to
think about solving its problems later in life.
Subodh Kumar, a student of mechanical engineering,
went this year to some Himalayan states, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Chickmagalur and
Alleppey in 47 days. His project was to study how culture influences beverages
in these regions, but the real effect on him was much more than that. When he
started, he was sure he would be mechanical engineer all his life. When he came
back, he was sure he did not want to be an engineer. “I understood that
engineers can do other things also,” says Kumar.
An IIT education that makes students question the
very decision to become an engineer. Now that’s real change.
hari.pulakkat@timesgroup.com
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