IIT : A Brand No More!
Jul 27th, 2009 | By Sayan | Category: Affairs
Image source: Wikipedia
Year after year, lakhs of students burn the midnight oil for months at a stretch to earn a place in the hallowed halls of the Indian Institutes of Technology. IIT Joint Entrance Examination is considered to be one of the toughest entrance exams in India. Hence, it is not a surprise that only the best brains get into it. But the news that as many as 500 students said no to IIT’s this year is quite interesting, as well as shocking. Further, during this year’s admission there weren’t enough qualified candidates to fill up the reserved seats on offer for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, or the physically challenged. This despite the fact that the IITs had made various concessions to ensure they could fill the SC/ST seats. They lowered entry levels for these categories and even went as low as 50% below the last general category student’s marks to do justice to the quota. Even this did not help them get the required number of backward category students.
So, the question arises: Is the IIT brand vanishing?
Indian Institute of Technology’s were created as centers of excellence for higher training, research and development in science, engineering and technology. Till two years back there were seven IIT’s in India at Delhi, Kanpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Kharagpur, Guwahati and Roorkee. However, the government has added eight more to this list and it is these newly formed IIT’s that are failing to attract students. So, now these newly formed IIT’s will have to fight with the other institutes to attract good enough students into their admission list. This will certainly have an impact on the “Brand IIT” as the gap between quality of students getting into these IIT’s and those getting into the older IIT’s will certainly be huge.
However, having said all this, India strongly needs quality technical institutes which produce quality engineers, especially with the kind of development taking place and also the future requirements. Hence, it is the responsibility of the government to look into these aspects and perhaps give a greater autonomy to the IIT’s regarding the admission procedures and the expansion plans.
IIT’s on the other hand must take care that their brand does not get de-valued by ensuring best faculty and other facilities to the students of these newly formed IITs so that they are at par with the student’s of the older IIT’s in all respects.The student’s of these newly formed IIT’s must feel proud of being an IITian.
The IITs were never intended to be a brand as they were never set up for a commercial purpose. It was due to their noble objective of creating world class engineers in the service of the Indian nation and steps taken to ensure that the students get the best opportunities. In short, the only ‘Return on Investment’ sought from IITs was quality researchers (a fact that people often forget given the craze for the B.Tech degree and the IIT-JEE exam) and engineers and not a ‘brand’ like the more commercially driven private institutes.
Till now, there is no institution in India other than IITs and IISc where there is an emphasis on research and almost all the institutional research taking place in India is in these institutions.
Reservation is a problem created by the politicians and not the IITs and the author of this article only shows his ignorance and foolishness by saying that the IITs lowered the cut-offs for students. Truth is, there is political pressure on not only IITs but also the private colleges to admit more SC/ST/OBC candidates and also to ensure that they pass. The Constitution of India has been amended and Article 15(5) has been inserted to empower the government to extend caste quotas in private colleges. The State of U.P. has in fact acted on this article and made quotas mandatory in private institutions, whether aided or unaided, foreign or Indian. So quota issue will affect not only IITs but all institutions, government or private. Therefore, the author of this post is requested to come out of his well and take a holistic view of things outside, otherwise he would only be exposing his ignorance of the real issue.