World-class Universities and Institutes in India

Of late, I got to read a few articles about the Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s remarks on IIT/IIM faculty. He had said that the IITs/IIMs were world-class institutions because of their students and not the faculty. His statement was not original and is an open secret.

Research output in India (including the IITs/IIMs) is negligible both in terms of quantity and quality. The primary reason behind this is that there is no ecosystem for research to happen in India. There is neither strong industry-academia partnership nor adequate funding. MIT’s annual budget is about seven times the government funding available to all the IITs put together. (Source: Angela Saini's book The Geek Nation).The whole government funding system should be replaced by an endowment system which is in vogue in the US and other European universities and institutes. The ecosystem is not just about money but a change of mindset as well. In the US, higher education institutions follow the principle of “publish or perish” in letter and spirit. The same culture needs to be imbibed by Indian higher education institutions if they really want to become world-class. Besides, the government needs to give them autonomy and reservations must not exist at all (neither for the students nor for the faculty). The students at IITs/IIMs and other higher education institutions in India should be selected purely on the basis of merit and should be encouraged to do research for which adequate grants and support should be provided by their alma mater. India Inc. should also come forward and donate money generously to set up chair professorships, new departments and high-tech labs as a part of their CSR activities. The bottomline is if you can keep the government and reservations away ( or at least, as far as possible) and change the funding model altogether, there is no reason why we cant have a few Indian universities up there in the global top 100 rankings.