What is Taking the Sheen Off India's Best Engineering Brand - IITs _ Business Today

11/3/2015 What is taking the sheen off India's best engineering brand IITs : Business Today

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What is taking the sheen off India's bestengineering brand IITsGoutam Das April 24, 2013

Nitin Kumar Reddy came across as a chilledout guy. He was nerdy, yet jovial. His friends atthe Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, where he was studying mechanicalengineering, called him FireStallion. Every day, he would download hard to find movies andshare them over the local computer network that connects all students at the IIT. And just forfun, he once spent 14 hours without a break building a large crane using Lego blocks. "I'mawesome," he wrote on his profile page on a social networking site.

One hot muggy afternoon in May 2011, Reddy locked the door of his thirdfloor hostel roomfrom within and hanged himself from the ceiling fan.

IIT Madras, where 8,000 students and 530 teachers share a 620acre campus with 400species of plants, blackbucks, fanthroated lizards, tortoises and venomous cobras, wasrattled. Reddy, a finalyear M.Tech student was behind schedule on a project, and had beenasked to stay back another six months to complete the work, while everybody else in hisdepartment graduated.

Perhaps, Reddy was not able to cope withthe academic pressure, or the shame ofstaying back at the institute was too much.Or he was upset that he had to let go aplum job he had landed. Whatever thereason, the 24yearold's suicide is a cursorto an epidemic across all IITs. According tothe government, 10 IIT students have killedthemselves since 2010 there were twosuicides each in IIT Madras and Kharagpurand one each in IIT Kanpur and Delhi in2011 alone. And a government taskforcefound 18 attempted suicides in the last twoyears in the centrallyfunded technicalinstitutions.

All is not well with the IITs, the country'sfinest technical education chain to whichmillions of youngsters have aspired since

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the 1950s. In 2012, a record 479,651candidates appeared for the Joint EntranceExam, or JEE, for 9,647 undergraduateseats. And, when this year's JEE wraps upin June, the number is likely to havecrossed half a million.

But over the years, the JEE, wellknown forits tough standards, has developedloopholes that may let smart, but notnecessarily the best, brains in the countryinto IITs. This, at a time when competingglobal engineering schools such asSingapore's Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity, Hong Kong University ofScience and Technology, TsinghuaUniversity, Beijing, and Korea AdvancedInstitute of Sicence and Technology havepopped up into global prominence.

Much of this is because of the scorchingpace at which IITs have expanded over thelast five years. Still, there is no denying theerosion in the quality of output of the IITs at least, relatively speaking and what itdoes to the famed Brand IIT, which played arole in changing India's image from a "nationof snake charmers" to a "nation of(computer) mice". Is Brand IIT killing itself?

{blurb}The number of IITs now totals 16. Nine ofthem came in or after 2008. The result hasbeen a split in how IITs are perceived. The

new IITs at Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Ropar, Patna, Indore andMandi, some professors and recruiters say, are not quite IITs the way the world expectsthem to be.

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"Employers clearly understand the difference between old IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay,Madras, Kanpur, Delhi) and the new ones. There are the old ones, the intermediate ones likeRoorkee and Guwahati, and the new kids on the block," a senior professor of the ComputerScience Department in IIT Delhi, who didn't want to be identified, says. "The old IITs stillhave the same value as they did earlier but you can't say you are from IIT. You have to saywhich one you are from," he adds.

That is a view resonating widely among IIT's alumni across the world. "Until now, an IITmeant something, now there is a distinction based on what follows 'IIT' as in the location,"says San Francisco serial entrepreneur and IIT Kharagpur alumnus Indra Singhal. Thatdistinction has slowly eroded the way the world perceives the IITs. "There is a dilution in



Brand IIT because with the increased numbers, there is a perception that the selectivity is nolonger there," seconds Anand Jagannathan FounderCEO at Newzstand Corp, also inCalifornia, and an IIT Kanpur alumnus of 1974.

{blurb}That is not an emotional argument from a bunch of people bent on preserving IIT's elitist tag.The reason employers want to differentiate is because of quality the new IITs, mostlylocated in smaller cities and towns, have not been able to attract good faculty. Neither aretheir facilities at par with the older ones. Ask Intel. Every year, the world's biggest chipmakerhires about 150 engineers from campuses in India with specialised skills in areas such aspower management mostly from the IITs. Apreeta Singh, Senior Manager of Talent Deliveryat the company says she only goes to the top four old IITs. "We don't go to the new IITsbecause there definitely is a difference in the quality of students. And these IITs don't havethe brand name.," she says. "Even other MNCs would not want to go to new IITs."

{blurb}Nobody doubts that India needs more quality engineering institutes. The country mints about600,000 engineers every year and counts about four million students in its engineeringcolleges but employability is a critical issue. Different surveys say just one in four engineersin India can be ushered into a job, and that too after training. Only 17.45 per cent ofengineers are employable in the IT services sector and just 2.68 per cent in IT productcompanies, a study by talent assessment company Aspiring Minds concluded in 2011.Engineering companies fall somewhere in between and make one hire from 20 candidates,says Varun Aggarwal, cofounder of Aspiring Minds. India, reckons Mohandas Pai, theformer HR chief of Infosys, needs around 400,000 engineers a year.



While a higher number of IITs in dispersed locations can help increase the supply of qualityengineering talent in the future, the kind of quality educationists are looking for remainselusive.

One way to raise the bar on quality of education at the new IITs would be to bring in topnotch faculty but that is easier preached than done. A typical IIT assistant professor starts atabout Rs 75,000 a month less than what many engineers from Tier II colleges get as theirfirst pay cheque. Says Ashok Misra, a former director of IIT Bombay and now the Chairmanof the JEE Council, "People go for teaching because of their passion for it. But if yourcolleagues working in corporate offices get four times your salary, it does affect yourteaching." But with government rules on compensation in operation at the IITs, there is littlethey can do to raise faculty salaries. The irony is that even trainers in some JEE coachingcentres make six times as much, if not more.



{blurb}IIT administrators hold that attracting good faculty will continue to remain a challenge forinstitutes located in places like Ropar, Jodhpur, Gandhinagar and Mandi because of whatthey call a "twobody" problem both the husband and wife want to work and that may not befeasible in a smaller location. "This was not a problem in the previous generation when onespouse was a homemaker," says Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director of IIT Madras. IITKharagpur, a sleepy town with a large railway workshop and an AngloIndian heritage, easilyflourished, having started in 1951.

But IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, in comparison, which according to a board member of theinstitute has a "wow campus" being located in the hills, has only 22 teachers of a sanctionedstrength of 90.

So why set up IITs in remote places? "That is a good question," Ramamurthi snaps. Thereare no easy answers.



The political undertones of the expansion in the number of IITs is unmistakable. Most of thenew IITs began in 2008 and were announced by the late Minister of Human ResourceDevelopment Arjun Singh on March 28, 2008 as Congress insiders were betting on a waveof welfare measures to bring them back to power. A year later, in the 2009 general elections,the Congress emerged as the single largest party and formed the second UnitedProgressive Alliance government.

To be sure, it was not the new IITs' decision that helped Congress at the hustings.Academics say that if at all they had to be set up, the new IITs should have been spaced out say, one every five years, or even one every two years. "That would have been easier onthe system. But the timing and locations were political decisions. In the longterm, these IITs



will become good," Dheeraj Sanghi, Dean of Academic Affairs at IIT Kanpur, sayshopefully.

{blurb}Tall and lean, Krishna P. Jagannathan moves around the IIT Madras campus in smartsunglasses. A 2004 B. Tech graduate from the IIT, he went on to do his Ph.D from MITbefore coming back to join his alma mater as an assistant professor in the ElectricalEngineering department. Soon, he will be in Italy and Japan presenting conference papers onwireless networks. In the one and a half years he has been at the IIT as a professor, he hasalready published his research work in two journals, besides readying two conferencepapers. Jagannathan's research output is a slight improvement by IIT Madras standards of adecade ago. In 2002/2003, publications per faculty member a year at the IIT stood at 1.23,according to an IIT review committee report of 2004, chaired by noted scientist P. RamaRao. In other IITs, it varied between 1.03 and 1.69. In 2011/12, the output by professors atIIT Madras jumped to 2.05.

IIT Bombay has hired 100 people from abroad since March 2010. And IIT Madras' intake ofsuch faculty has been about 30 a year. The thrust towards research is in one way aimed atcountering the faculty shortage. The Anil Kakodkar Committee of 2010 in its strategicrecommendations for IITs set a target of 10,000 doctoral fellows being produced annually bythe 202025 period, up from the current 1,000. The hope is that some of these Ph.Ds willstay to teach at the IITs.



Today, faculty at the IITs is far behind the ideal number needed to do a good job of teaching the teacherstudent ratio in the older IITs are trending at 1:16 while ideally it should be 1:10.Quality recruitments have simply not kept pace with the sudden expansion in the number ofseats. In 2007, IITs had 5,537 seats. This jumped 74 per cent to 9,647 by 2012, with most ofthe expansion happening in the reserved categories as the Ministry of Human Resourcesand Development implemented 27 per cent reservation for the Other Backward Classes(OBCs) in 2008. "People believe that there has been dilution in quality. That is expectedbecause you have admitted 50 per cent more people today," says KrishnanBalasubramanian, Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras.

The problem of teacher shortage is compounded by the fact that many students feeldisillusioned with some of the older professors who continue to teach from 20yearold notesand have not upgraded themselves with the changing times. Textbooks, however, arereviewed by some of the IITs every three years.

Armin Mustafa, an IIT Kanpur postgraduate from 2010, now works with Samsung. She saysshe was lucky to have a good teacher. "But in the IIT there were twothree professors whodid not teach much. They took half the classes in a semester. They were either on leave orjust absent," she says.

A recent survey carried out by a student group at IIT Bombay incidentally, the preferreddestination of top JEE qualifiers (in 2011, 70 of the top 100 JEE qualifiers went to IIT,Bombay) is revealing. In an article headlined 'Why don't we study at IITB?' published in itsstudent magazine InsIghT, the authors write: "Surveys among our students haveconsistently shown them to be unhappy with the teaching at IITB. 88 per cent of therespondents feel that one of the important factors why they don't study is because theprofessors haven't succeeded in generating enough interest in their courses. 72 per cent ofthe respondents also blame the course content for being too theoretical and lacking anapplication perspective making it disinteresting."

{blurb}Nidhi Shanbagh, one of the students involved in the survey says that students are notquestioning the capability of professors. "We just wanted to see if the teaching can be mademore interesting so that we study more. We are not putting enough hours into study," shetold BT.



The same survey raises another important issue. As IITs try and transition to being institutesof research, teachers are perhaps spending more time in research than in teaching."Research is the most important factor in faculty recruitment as well as promotion, althoughcourse evaluation is also a component. It's not hard to see why it is possible that researchcould be more interesting while teaching could be relegated to being one of the unpleasantaspects of the job, for many professors," the article states.

The issue of teaching quality is relevant in other IITs as well. A professor from IIT Kanpurwho did not want to be quoted says that there has been a decline in the quality of courses."Twenty five years ago, teachers gave out assignments to students every week and thesewere graded and returned. Today, they can't give out assignments because grading themwill take more time," he says, adding that "Class sizes are much larger now and there is nopersonal connect with the student".

Harish Hande, cofounder of sustainable energy company SELCO Solar also graduatedfrom IIT Kharagpur in 1990. He holds IITs are not teaching coursework relevant to India andthe faculty still have an elitist bent of mind. "IIT students are the classic product of subsidiesand have created jobs and innovations for America. There is hardly a connect between IIT



and rural India. Industrial Training Institutes (governmentrun technical training organisations)have had more impact on rural India students from these institutes made, installed andmaintained pumps that have helped in the agri revolution, for example," Hande says.

While coursework seems adrift, there is a growing view among that IITs may well beadmitting less meritorious students given the huge expansion in the number of reservedcategory seats. It is a touchy issue and most professors shy away from talking about thequality of reserved category candidates. But it is obvious everybody is worried about thedisparity in a class the Kakodkar Committee conducted an online survey inviting inputsfrom all stakeholders (including students and teachers) on the IIT system. A large majoritysuggested periodic review of the structure and pattern of the JEE to ensure true quality andcautioned against expansion at the expense of quality.

"There is no significant difference between general category candidates and OBCs," says aprofessor with an administrative role in one of the IITs. "But some of the other castestudents, particularly those who come from Hindi medium, have difficulty following lectures."The medium of instruction in the IITs is English. "They have major problems in the first yearbut are counselled not to lose confidence. The average pass out grade in four years is 7.3.Students from SC/ST background have grades of around 6.5," he adds.

The other trend is of students laserfocused on careers these days. The perception of qualitychanging has to do with cultural change, says the II T Delhi computer sciences professorquoted without naming earlier. "Twenty years ago, there were brilliant people who had no

We are getting good students. Whether we are getting the best students is difficult to say...: Bhaskar Ramamurthi :Photo:Nilotpal Baruah



career ambition. They did crazy things, smoked grass, cracked exams," he says. "Today,everyone has a career path decided from the day he or she enters IIT."

The current JEE system has problems that might be leaving out truly bright students andadmitting just the smarter ones for undergraduate courses. Entrance exam coaching,professors say, makes candidates smarter at cracking the JEE. According to a JEE report,one in five registered students took coaching help during JEE 2012 but they made up abouthalf of the successful candidates.

"We are getting good students. Whether we are getting the best students is difficult to say inan elimination exam with this ratio. Somebody who is very good but didn't get coaching anddidn't know the strategy of time management may lose out to somebody who does not havethat spark. It could be matter of a few marks," Ramamurthi, the IIT Madras director,acknowledges, and hastens to add, "If I have gone for coaching, I am taught how to decidewhen a question is beyond my capability and move on. But the instinct of any bright studentis to 'let me take this up and do it'. He may waste too much time on a question."

Strangely, IITs alone has been responsible for the growth of the coaching industry in manyways. The JEE earlier made candidates go through a multiplechoice screening examfollowed by a problemsolving exam where answers were graded by humans. But withgrowing volumes, such grading became difficult. Around the year 2006, "We made one big mistake. We said do away with the second exam.This started coaching for multiple choice questions. We did not anticipate that coaching willdistort it. Now, there is no training for real understanding," Ramamurthi says.*

How does this distortion reflect on the campus? Students have become less serious aboutcoursework. "People believe that there has been a dilution in quality. That is expectedbecause you have admitted 50 per cent more people today," says KrishnanBalasubramanian, professor at the Department Of Mechanical Engineering at IIT Madras. Hejoined the IIT 13 years ago and cites an example of how he has seen a change in studentmotivation towards academics. "In the first sixseven years of my tenure, we got at least 510 students publishing papers every year from my department at the undergraduate level.Today, I have great difficulty in finding a single student who wants to do it at that level."

IIT students are also becoming less nerdy, it seems. The survey by InsIghT, the IIT Bombaystudent magazine, says that 75 per cent of the students at the IIT don't spend any time onacademics if there are no upcoming assignments and 80 per cent of students study lessthan three hours a week. IIT Madras has been shutting Internet connectivity during somehours of the night to encourage students to sleep.

{blurb} In the middle of all these, some recruiters and academics feel that the gap between IITs andsome of the secondtier engineering institutions has narrowed. P. Anandan, ManagingDirector of Microsoft Research India asserts that IITs are not any worse than they were 15years back. But in the same breath, he rates Indraprastha Institute of InformationTechnology, Delhi (IIITDelhi), which was created as a State University by an act of Delhi



Government in 2008, in the same league as the IITs. He insists others such as InternationalInstitute of Information technology in Hyderabad are also in that league.

Vineet Kaul, the Chief People Officer at metals company Hindalco Industries Ltd and theformer HR head of Philips, does not recruit from IITs but has experience of recruiting fromthese institutes in his previous company. "Our experience with the National Institutes ofTechnology has been good at Hindalco. The students offer us quality and stability. The topquartile of the students at NITs and BITS are very good and quite comparable to talent at theIITs," he stresses. Arjun Malhotra, who cofounded HCL Technologies along with ShivNadar back in the 1970s and more recently, was the Chairman and CEO of IT servicescompany Headstrong, says there are departments in some NITs that match IIT standards.He cites the example of the Computer Science Department at NIT Surathkal.

If the IITs don't pull up their socks, they will soon face much tougher competition from bothIndian colleges on one hand and international universities on the other. With all the chestthumping in India about being premier, IITs don't figure in the list of top 200 universities in theworld. As per QS World University Rankings 2012/13, which evaluates 700 universities inthe world, the best rank was of IIT Delhi at 212. Bombay (227), Kanpur (278), Madras (312)and Kharagpur (349) follow. IITs have slipped a bit since 2008 when the highest ranking IITwas Delhi at 164. Professors at IITs often criticise the QS ranking system since themethodology does not favour standalone tech institutes but the writing on the wall is clear:Brand IIT is under siege.



{blurb}But hope was evident on a recent Wednesday sunny morning on the IIT Delhi campus. Theinstitute was gearing up for the ninth edition of I2Tech, a programme to open up to the publicthe research it does. "The general public was not aware of the research and innovationhappening at IIT. "It is important to reach out and tell people what we are doing," saysMahesh Abegaonkar, Professor of Electronics and Communications, adding that this year heexpects more than the 5,000 visitors who turned up in 2012. A small effort at buffing BrandIIT. And, not a day late.

Additional reporting by Sarika Malhotra in New Delhi and Shalini Kathuria Narang in SanFrancisco

(* Due to an editing error, the version of this story that ran in the magazine incorrectlymentioned the year as 2000 in this paragraph.)(A line relating to IIT Kanpur suicide has been removed from the fourth para of the story)Print Close

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What is Taking the Sheen Off India's Best Engineering Brand - IITs _ Business Today