INDIA: Row over research quality at elite institutes

A high-level public row has broken out between two cabinet ministers over the quality of India's premier institutions, the Indian Institutes of Technology, and particularly their research capability, which is seen as lagging behind other countries.

The spat was sparked when Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh (pictured), a mechanical engineering graduate from IIT-Mumbai, said last week that hardly any worthwhile research was done at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) or Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). He blamed academics for the poor quality of research.

"There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in IITs is not world-class. It is the students in IITs who are world-class. So the IITs and IIMs are excellent because of the quality of students not because of quality of research or faculty," Ramesh said.

India has 14 IITs, seven of them established in the last three years. Competition for seats is cutthroat, with 470,000 students taking the IIT joint entrance examination in 2010 and only 13,104 qualifying. That year some 241,000 students applied for roughly 2,400 IIM seats.

Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal flamed the fires of the controversy by saying that the country's most prestigious institutions were lagging in world-class standards. "Is even one of our institutions world class? If it is world-class it must be in the top 100 to 150 institutions in the world, [but] that is not evident."

Later in the week, Sibal backtracked.

The IITs had "not gained critical mass to change global scientific discourse" but the problem did not relate to their faculty, he said, adding that India spent less than a third of the money the United States did on research and this was "not the fault of faculty".

"Compared to the United States and China, which allocate US$250 billion and about US$60 billion respectively for research, in India the allocation for research is only about US$8 million. However, I am happy that the number of students in postgraduate courses in the IITs and the IIMs has started growing now," Sibal told local media.

Teachers, students and alumni of IITs, which send hundreds of graduate students to elite institutions in the US and the UK to pursue doctoral degrees and research, have been outraged at the criticism.

But the debate has touched on wider issues of whether such institutions should produce world-class research or concentrate on preparing the best students in the country for high-level engineering and technology careers. It has also highlighted the huge gap in resources for research in India, compared to the world's top-ranked research institutions.

Sibal had already made public his concern about IITs' bachelor of technology programmes, which largely produce graduates for industry, and their lack of focus on postgraduate study and research.

Srivats Krishna, a PhD scholar at IIT Madras, said that the minister was expecting too much too soon from IITs and IIMs. Speaking during a television debate, he said: "IITs and IIMs were initially established to provide the leaders for India's corporate sector."

Despite a six-fold rise in the budget of IIT-Madras since 2000, the budget of the top-ranked Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was "100 times greater in terms of the investment and research alone. So you are really comparing the last 150 to 200 years of research in the West to about 10 to 15 years at the IIT," Krishna said.

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, an alumni of IIM Ahmedabad and founder and Vice-chairman of the jobs portal naukri.com, said that although there was a gap in research, there was original work being done at the IIMs.

"If you look at the conventional wisdom of what good research is, in terms of papers being published in leading journals of the world, there is a gap. But at IIM Ahmedabad a whole body of knowledge has been created over the last 50 years, where they have developed Indian case studies. I think that is significant contribution, and original work," Bikhchandani told the NDTV news channel.

But, he added, low faculty salaries did not help the research situation at IITs or IIMs.

"If you pay your faculty poorly, they are going to spend a lot of time doing consultancy to augment their income. In the US you have teaching professors and research professors, who take [teach] one course a year. The rest of the time they do research. If you want more research you have to create an environment that supports research," Bikhchandani said.

The Anil Kakodkar Committee, which was set up by the education ministry to recommend measures to improve IITs, has produced a set of recommendations aimed at bolstering their research.

They include increasing the number of PhDs from fewer than 1,000 students graduating each year to 10,000 graduating every year by 2024-25.

The committee also suggested that IITs engage with other high-quality engineering and science institutions across the country to enlarge the pool for selection of students and also to attract their academic faculty into PhD programmes.

And it proposed that all government ministries allow IITs a minimum of 20% overheads without a ceiling on research and development projects carried out by them, citing major US universities which charge overheads of up to 50%.

The education ministry is considering creating a special fund and a dedicated cadre of technical assistants, among a host of proposals designed to improve research at the premier institutions.

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