Frontline on IITs

So what do I think of this article in the Frontline, asks Ramnath.

I think the article is mostly a fair one.
The points it makes are:

  1. Most IITians go abroad after graduation, wasting the money spent on them and generally defeating the purpose for which IITs were set up.
  2. Most IITians, regardless of whether they are in India or abroad, don’t work in their field of specialisation.
  3. IITs have not been able to “attract” women and SCs?and STs.

To which I can only say:

  1. True, but that is not the IITs’ fault. They have done their job quite well. The rest of the Indian economy hasn’t bothered to pick them up.
  2. True, but this would be inevitable even in a perfect world. Technologies change, demands of the economy change, old skills become irrelevant and new ones have to be learnt.
  3. It is not the job of IITs to “attract” any one. Giving such social goals to IITs will make their other goals unattainable. Most of the 22.5% reserved category seats go unfilled in the IITs, because most of the SCs and STs could not make even the lowered cut-offs. If cut-offs were lowered even further, most people who joined would simply flunk out, or the profs would have to lower standards to such an extent that the reputation of the IITs would no longer have any meaning.

However, I do think that there is one change that the IITs should go through. The management and funding of the IITs should be gradually turned over to a consortium of Alumni and Industry. IITs should actively seek research projects, endowments and scholarships from them.

Yes, this will mean that they’d be effectively privatized, but there will be advantages. The government won’t have to spend tax-payers funds anymore. IITs will enjoy closer interaction with the industry. Industry will be involved in research, which means that there will be accountability without too much pressure.
( I’m not opposed to the profit motive as such, but I realise that research may not give results sufficiently quickly to justify Return-On-Investment analyses, or the results of the research may not be encashable ever. How to enforce accountability when there is no way to measure results in terms of cash is always a tricky problem)