What does the future hold for the IITs? (2024)

IITs:vision 2050

The IIT system has been around now for over half acentury. It started with a concept and the critical need earlier was to proveit. The IITs have done this handsomely. IITs also needed to play a leadershiprole in technical education, as this wasn’t well established in India.

They have clearly succeeded in this task, as the existing style oftechnical education is similar to the IITs’: a semester system,course-based, continuous evaluation and a grade system among other things arenow standard.

In the early years, the IITs were clearly driven bythese objectives. Having achieved success, however, no clear vision for thefuture seems to be emerging. It seems that the system as a whole is happy in itscurrent state.

University systems have a long life, and a 30- or40-year-old university is relatively young by global standards. The culture andnature of these long-lasting institutions is defined slowly, over many years,with universities redefining themselves to stay relevant.

The IITs clearly have along way to go. In our country, great universities of the past have faded intomediocrity over time, and an university or institute has to constantly reinventit*elf to avoid this fate.

Now, there is a need to define the roleand vision of the IITs. It is only when this is clear can a concerted effort bemade to move towards it in the decades to come. Given the dynamics of the system— the top administrators are chosen for every three or five years, and theMHRD ministers (the IIT’s parent ministry) change regularly — it isvery easy not to have a future vision and just exist.

On the face ofit, it seems that everyone concerned has accepted that the IITs just need toexist in their current state, and keep improving their quality of education andR&D to keep up with the times. But is this what the IITs should be headingtowards?

Let us look at some of the possible broad directions inwhich the IITs can go, by drawing analogies with the world’s long-lastinguniversities.

First, they can continue essentially as they are,keeping up with the times. That is, continue with a top-class smallundergraduate programme and an average research programme. In this state, eachIIT will continue to produce about 400 to 500 BTechs a year, about as manyMTechs and about 25 PhDs a year in engineering (not counting the PhDs insciences).

As thecountry’s technical education system and industry’s needs grow, theIITs will be of little significance in the times to come.

The secondpossibility is to become a top-class research university, but of a small size,like CalTech. Here, the undergrad student intake remains at 500, but thepost-grad programme becomes mostly a PhD programme and the research profileundergoes a large qualitative and quantitative change.

Though thismay be considered desirable, it isn’t clear how this vision can beachieved. A CalTech-like vision needs to be supported by a world-class faculty,and given that the IITs’ existing faculty will be there for another 20 to30 years, reaching this state is going to be a huge challenge.

Thethird possibility is to become a large technical university along the lines ofGeorgia Tech and MIT in the US or NTU in Singapore. In this model, each IIT willhave 500 to 1,000+ faculty members, about 10,000 to 20,000 students (a studentfaculty ratio of 1:20), and a strong and large research programme.

The academic programmes will revolve around engineering and science,but will expand to include other related disciplines like management andeconomics. Here, about a third of the students will be post-graduate students,with a vast majority working towards a PhD.

This is an eminentlyfeasible vision. The existing IITs have established themselves and have a largebase of alumni support. All these can be leveraged to expand. That’s notto say that expansion will be easy. But, given the IITs’ reputation andhistory, this vision is achievable.

Of course, it cannot be achievedovernight, but should be achievable within the next two decades or so. Capitalexpenditure of about Rs 1,000 crore over the next 10 or 20 years will be neededto upgrade infrastructure to handle this size. The annual budgetary support willalso have to increase in a commensurate manner to over Rs 200crore.

And the fourth possibility is for an IIT to become a generalpurpose university along the lines of big public research universities likeBerkeley, Illinois, Purdue, Penn State, Ohio State, etc. That is, an IIT becomesa large research university, but more general in scope and not limited toscience and technology.

It should be mentioned that India does notreally have a large world-class research university. Most of its universitieshave now become examination or teaching bodies with little research activity.Some could have become world-class research universities, but that was not tobe, thanks to how the universities have been managed and interfered with.

The IITs, on the other hand, have evolved stable and independentsystems with sufficient autonomy and internal checks to use the autonomyproperly. Hence, if they grow into large general purpose research universities,they should be able to maintain their quality.

The number ofstudents can be over 30,000, with 2,000+ faculty. This again is a worthy vision,one which will be consistent with the nation’s growth. And again, this isa vision that will take a few decades to achieve and provide direction to theIITs.

The budgetarysupport for infrastructure as well as yearly budget will be somewhat larger thanin the previous option.

Incidentally, it is not necessary for allIITs to follow the same vision. Some can become large general purpose researchuniversities, while others can become large technical universities. When theIITs are large and research-oriented, they will become serious players in theworld academic community and not be regarded as places that produce goodundergrads to feed other institutions.

Their impact in the countrywill, of course, increase and their importance preserved in times to come. IITsare at a threshold today, they have had an excellent first innings, but there isno clarity on the purpose of the second. A clear future vision needs to bedefined for these institutes of national importance, such that they, along withthe government, can work in a defined direction for their next innings.

The author is a professor at IITKanpur. The views expressed are personal