India@75: It’s time to evaluate the IITs, one of independent India's proudest achievements

According to Michael Lewis’ 1999 biography of Silicon Valley super-entrepreneur Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics, Netscape, MyCFO), when Clark was setting out to create Healtheon/ WebMD, the internet-based health services network, his modus operandi was singularly uncomplicated: he believed that the success of his enterprise would be directly proportional to the number of IITians he could hire, since “they were the most talented engineers in the Valley… and they work their butts off.” WebMD was sold for $2.8 billion in cash in 2017.

The IIT Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) is quite simply the toughest and most competitive college admission test in the world. Last year, more than 22 lakh candidates sat for the exams, which offered only about 16,000 seats. That’s seven successful candidates per 1,000. Never in the history of mankind has there been such competition and such coveted an educational reward. Harvard takes in one of every 20 people who apply.

The JEE is also possibly the fairest examination in human history. And this is all the more incredible because we are talking about India, where corruption and nepotism in the education sector are rampant. You may be the nephew of the President of India, but you won’t get into IIT unless you crack the JEE. Many hallowed colleges in the West offer seats in exchange for a generous donation or if the applicant is the son or daughter of an alumnus. Not so, in the IITs. You have to pass that test.

This is something that every Indian should be proud of.

IIT Bombay main building (Photo: Arne Hückelheim via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

Recounting the names of exceptionally accomplished IIT alumni is a tedious task, because there are many hundreds of them, from Nandan Nilekani to Sundar Pichai, Raghuram Rajan to Bhavish Aggarwal. But what is interesting is that many of them have been immensely successful in areas other than engineering, which is what their alma maters supposedly taught them.

Rajan is an obvious example, but to cite a few more, there’s Duvvuri Subbarao, who was governor of the Reserve Bank of India; Jairam Ramesh and Arvind Kejriwal in politics; Nitesh Tiwari, who directed Dangal, one of the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time, who also made the much-awarded Chhichhore, the only authentic cinematic depiction till date of IIT life (3 Idiots does not even come close). There is more to the IITs than an engineering education.

So how did all this happen? How did India do it?

Jawaharlal Nehru deserves full credit for greenlighting a madly ambitious project for higher technical education even as the country was dealing with the horrors of the Partition, but the genesis story is slightly more complicated.

The IITs were the brainchild of Sir Ardeshir Dalal, an aristocratic technocrat. As a member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council, the Cabinet-in-Waiting, as India inched towards independence from British Raj, Dalal recognized that technology would have a critical role to play in building a free India. His suggestion that India should have institutes that produced world-class engineers was accepted as one to be explored and a committee was set up.

In March 1946, the 22-member committee headed by industrialist Nalini Ranjan Sarkar submitted an interim report that recommended the setting up of four such institutes, one each in the east, west, north and south.
Sarkar was a friend of Dr B.C. Roy, at that time the most powerful politician in Bengal—he would be West Bengal’s first chief minister after Independence. Dr Roy was a go-getter. The moment the Sarkar committee submitted the report, he went to Nehru and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: I’ll give the land free of cost, let the first IIT be set up in Bengal.

In an innovative use of available resources, Dr Roy zeroed in on a disused prison in the village of Hijli, 120 km from Calcutta. This was turned into the academic building—classrooms, laboratories and administrative offices—of the first IIT, named after the nearby railway township of Kharagpur.

IIT Kharagpur, in September 1951. (Photo: Bhim Chandra Mondal via Wikimedia Commons)

But the strangest thing here is that the IITs were set up based on an interim report—the Sarkar committee never produced a final report. IIT Kharagpur admitted its first batch of students in 1951, and in an extraordinary mission-mode effort, the Indian government set up four more IITs—at Bombay, Kanpur, Delhi and Madras—in the next seven years. The Indian Institute of Technology Act was passed by Parliament only in 1961, when there were already five fully-functioning IITs churning out engineers.

The Sarkar committee’s report was truly visionary. It emphasized that the country should aim to develop an academic programme “supported by instructional processes that would encourage Indian students to think creatively”. The products of these institutes were expected to be “creative scientist-engineers”, technical leaders with “a broad human outlook” and individuals with “creative initiative in future situations”.

How many government committee reports use the word “creative” even once? As a new free India was being conceptualized, the committee’s members saw their goal as an essential contribution to building something that they owed to the generations to come for a nation that they dreamt of.
The Sarkar committee report suggested that India build a cadre of well-rounded future leaders that a sturdy republic would need.

That was—let’s say—the supply side. On the demand side, the IITs were—and are—seen by middle-class Indians—and everyone lower on the economic scale—as a passport for their children to a better life. An IIT degree for your child meant—and still means—to millions of Indian families, a way out of a mire in which they saw themselves as hapless sufferers.

Yet, the IIT system and IITians—whom Nehru called “the cream of the nation”—have always been stalked by many questions. The foremost one, of course, is whether IITians have contributed more to the US economy than to India's.

I am an IITian who did not emigrate, and am married to an IITian who topped her class and could easily have gone to any US university of her choice, but did not. We stayed in India out of what in hindsight seems to be a vague and weird patriotism.

We graduated in the mid-1980s, and I would guess that 40-50 percent of our batchmates from all the IITs are settled and thriving in the US. But the “brain drain” was a direct effect of the Licence Raj command economy, where talent and innovation had little value, all technology was borrowed and outdated, and individual ambition was smothered. Nehru famously told JRD Tata: “I hate the word profit.” How can we blame the people who got a world-class education and then faced a future where mediocrity ruled and chose to go where their merit would be rewarded?

Today, only 8-10 percent of IITians go to the US for higher studies, and those who do, go because they are committed to be serious research scientists or scholars. The IITs have also now unleashed an incredible wave of entrepreneurial energy, the likes of which India has never seen. A significant part of our economic growth in any foreseeable future will be powered by these start-ups, launched by men and women who are absolutely unaware of the constraints that were imposed on the spirit of previous Indian generations.

IIT Madras Research Park. (Photo: Tushraa via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

But as India celebrates 75 years of its independence, it’s also time to critically evaluate one of our proudest achievements. There are at least two serious problems that the IIT system has been facing for many years now, and it’s high time we stopped being in denial.

One, a serious faculty quality issue. The institutes do not have enough good professors. It is to some extent a chicken and egg problem. IITians have contributed significantly to India’s economic story since the reforms began in 1991. This has also meant that today many IIT graduates join their first jobs at a salary higher than their professors who may have spent 20 years teaching young minds.

Yes, all over the world, an investment banking job pays much more than an academic one. A very simple reason for this is that an investment banker deals with large sums of actual cash and runs a hugely higher risk of losing her job than any professor. But in India, there is very little incentive to be a teacher in IIT, beyond personal ideology and a timid fear of engaging with “real world” industry. This issue must be addressed, and addressed urgently.

Let me mention just one factor here, obvious to any IITian, but not apparently to the government. Lots of people, having achieved their career goals and earned enough by their 40s to last them several lifetimes, wish to contribute to society—teaching is a common desire. But you cannot teach in the IITs unless you have a PhD. Does anyone seriously believe that someone who has a PhD and has spent all their life in classrooms can teach automotive engineering better than a person who helped design cars at Tata Motors? But the Tata Motors engineer is not eligible by law to teach at an IIT. If Elon Musk applied, he would not even get a standard letter of regret.

Two, and this may sound weird, after all that I have written so far, the IIT dream is now a widespread sociological problem in India. Middle-class parents start pushing their children to prepare for IIT from the day they turn 13—or perhaps even earlier. Coaching classes—all of us know about the JEE preparation factory in Kota, Rajasthan—feed into this and earn billions of rupees every year. Millions of Indians have completely lost the rich and essential experience of a carefree adolescence because of this. And remember, only seven in 1,000 get in. The other 993 run the risk of being scarred for life, as “losers”, and their parents are complicit in this branding.

The coaching classes have closely studied several decades of JEE test papers and can predict with a lot of certainty what sort of “problems” will be presented in the next exam. So the students mug up the answers to 100,000 questions, without ever getting to know the underlying physics or chemistry. The impact of all this is something we as a society should worry about.

IIT Delhi main building (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Visit any IIT (I have visited several of them many times in the last 20 years) and speak to the students informally. You may find that about 50 percent of them never wanted to be engineers, were put through the JEE preparation grind by their parents and resent them for that. But they know that they have a chance of being hired by a Google or a McKinsey and then their parents would have bragging rights about them. Does this weird dichotomy make for anything like a happy life?

(Some months ago, I met the co-founder of a big Indian e-commerce venture and one of the first things he told me was that he could not get into IIT but he had worked for Microsoft in the US. This man, who is at the very least a notional billionaire, seemed to be asking for some sort of entirely unnecessary validation from someone who did not care if he went to IIT.)

It is astonishing to me that the IITs have done nothing to correct this situation, because they have a higher commitment to India than just teaching engineering. Why not introduce an IQ test that carries 20 percent weightage in the JEE? This will instantly separate the rote-muggers from the deserving, and coaching classes will take many years to figure out how to teach students to crack IQ tests.

These things can be done, if there is a will. And these things are more important than announcing the setting up of a new IIT somewhere every year, for some political purpose. The IITs are one of the most precious things that independent India has built. Please take care of them and the vision that imbued them.