Towards a renaissance of the IITs

Had the IITs followed and succeeded in their original mission, India’s gross national product would have increased over ten times. They can yet become a force for rising India’s social, economic, and technological transformation.

The IITs were created to focus on research and postgraduate education that would keep India on the leading edge of knowledge in science and technology for building a prosperous India. Building a prosperous India meant using research and development (R&D) to raise the incomes of the poor and near-poor who constitute 80 per cent of India’s population. Despite the well-deserved kudos showered on the IITs’ undergraduate education, none of the IITs ranks in the top 100 institutions in the world in research based on any measure. Nor are the IITs graduating enough PhD students to meet the faculty needs of their sister IITs and other engineering colleges and technical institutions, let alone create a national culture of innovation.

Had the IITs followed their original mission and had their work raised the productivity of the adults in the 80 per cent of the poor or near-poor population to even half of the level of the leading industrialised countries, India’s gross national product would have increased over ten times.

I argue that the IITs can still become a major force to lead India’s social, economic, and technological transformation. I humbly suggest a plan the IITs could follow to pursue this original goal. First, they should support themselves financially. Secondly, they could focus on R&D in three interdependent domains: sustainability, partnerships with public and private organisations, and rural areas and slums to improve the economy of the poor and near-poor. Thirdly, the IITs could expand postgraduate education and include community engagement in undergraduate education.

Self-support, autonomy, and accountability

The IITs could treat the costs for IIT undergraduate students as loans, and the students would pay a percentage of their incomes until they pay off the loans or until they reach a certain age. The government, public and private organisations, and the alumni would support targeted research and postgraduate education. With reduced financial responsibilities, the Government of India should grant administrative autonomy to the IITs and create a system for their long-term accountability.

Research on sustainability

The IITs can become world leaders in research on sustainability. Their work can give India an economic advantage in the global market for sustainable technologies. The IITs could conduct research on ways to simultaneously reduce pollution, recycle wasted by-products, decrease the use of scarce or toxic resources, cut costs, and improve quality.

In addition to the direct economic benefits, this would also reduce disease, suffering, and health care costs. About 75 million of its 120 million rural households lack electricity. Appropriate technologies are available to meet their limited needs but require further R&D to make them operationally and economically viable. India could leapfrog over the high-income countries by developing new and renewable sources of energy.

The IITs could conduct research on all aspects of material science: creation of new materials and composites, use of new materials, and improvements and new uses for existing materials. India has yet to fully explore and develop the material resources that are unique to India, are abundant in India, or are renewable. For housing in villages, the IITs could improve such local materials as wood, straw, locally made bricks, and chunam (lime stone) and the technologies for using them.

The IITs could conduct research on rainwater harvesting and improve technologies for building water tanks, storage ponds, reservoirs, and gully plugs to raise the groundwater table. Such technologies would help in addressing the issue of melting of Himalayan glaciers that supply water to major rivers, better management of forests, soil conservation, reducing occurrences of droughts and floods, reversal of environment degradation, and mitigating the effects of global warming.

The burden of ignoring sustainable development will be borne relatively more by the low-income families because they cannot afford to pay for items that become expensive because of scarcity or for items needed to mitigate the effects of poor sustainability, such as air conditioning, health care, and automobiles.

Partnerships

The IITs could develop long-term strategic alliances with organisations that have R&D facilities, for example, multinational corporations, Indian companies, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, nuclear energy plants, and the space programme. Most organisations in the private and public sectors rely on off-the-shelf technologies, some of which are obsolete, and the IITs can address their needs. These organisations could recruit a large number of IIT PhDs each year to conduct research to increase their productivity and value.

Solutions for rural areas and slums

Solving the problems of rural areas and urban slums would require a combination of institute labs and development labs in villages and slums. In this pursuit, the IITs could collaborate with their alumni and the Indian Institutes of Management. Once these communities develop successful prototypes, the government and the private sector could replicate them throughout the country and persuade other engineering colleges and diploma-granting institutions to help in adapting the prototypes to individual local settings. India’s villages are ideal settings in which to create sustainable models of economic development that can be replicated in the rest of the world.

Each IIT could set up a laboratory dedicated to research into improving the infrastructure, products, and services that are used primarily by people near or below the poverty line. The IITs could create entrepreneurship programmes to help commercialise the products.

Each IIT community could adopt one or more slums and a cluster of villages whose level of economic development is below the national average to use as development laboratories. In villages, the IIT community could focus on developing water resources and conserving soil, improving housing and sanitary conditions, improving the tools and processes local workers use and the products local craftsmen make, building community cold storage facilities for small-scale farmers, creating home-based businesses for seasonally employed agriculture workers, building roads, and providing electricity. In urban slums, the IIT community could focus on the following areas: sanitary conditions, housing, water, electricity, and tools and processes used in industries located in the slums.

The alumni would contribute their talents and financial support to the development labs as guru dakshina. Clearly, the alumni owe most of their guru dakshina to the poor because the money the government spent on the IITs could have been spent on improving the incomes of the poor.

Partnerships with companies could help in commercialising successful prototypes developed and tested in the field labs. They could also lead such other collaborative efforts as partnerships with thermal power corporations on electricity for rural areas and with refrigeration companies to build prototype cold storage facilities.

PG and UG education

The IITs could pursue their original goal of expanding both masters’ and PhD programmes. They could waive loan repayments for those IIT undergraduates who went on to earn postgraduate degrees at an IIT. The IIT’s extensive alliances with entities in private and public sectors could provide support for postgraduate students’ research. The pursuit of integrated solutions to the problems of villages and slums could provide ideas for new areas of research.

When IIT graduates join the faculties of other engineering and polytechnic colleges, they would take with them a focus on work useful to the Indian economy. They would help to create a national culture of innovation.

As part of the curriculum, each student could conduct in-depth interviews with members of two low-income families about their economic and social well-being. The students could make public presentations about these interviews and propose ways to raise the incomes of these people. Such engagement with society would create a vibrant learning environment and help the students become more effective engineers, entrepreneurs, managers, public administrators, and researchers.

The poor have a deep-rooted disadvantage in the IIT entrance examination because of their lack of access to private schools and the tutorial classes. As a result, the IITs are increasingly admitting students only from high-income families. The fact that IIT graduates are succeeding in the job market and in their careers does not prove that those left out would not have performed as well or better. The IITs should examine these issues and try to draw students from all economic backgrounds.

By pursuing these initiatives, the IITs can speed up the social and economic transformation of India and lead the world in sustainable development. They can capture the imagination of the Indian people and take themselves to new heights.