Change of IIT Policies It seems that the Congress government realises its days are up in the country; so it would

be better to encumber the educational system of the country before going out of power for the last time. In view of the recent developments taken at the Joint Council of Indian Institutes of Technology, a student from IIT Kharagpur discusses the decisions taken and the consequences if such lunacy is implemented. Due to reasons made clearer in the following article, the person does not wish to be named and shall be rendered anonymous. Many significant decisions were made at the meeting. Decisions which might change the entire face of IITs in India and across the world. Lets begin by first knowing the decisions taken by the panel. 1. General Category Students will have to repay the difference between the tuition fee and IITs actual expenditure once they get a job 2. A common entrance examination for all engineering institutes in the country to be in place by 2013. In this format of examination, marks of XIIth boards will also be taken into account 3. An empowered task force will be constituted for implementations of the Kakodkar Committee for expanding the research output of IITs to 10,000 PhD graduates annually from around 1,000 presently by 2020. As for the faculty shortage, it would be enhanced to 16,000 with an additional 4,000 to be appointed every year 4. A task force will be set up to look into the increasing number of suicides by IIT students 1.General category students to repay the expenditure made on them by IITs Taking into consideration different IITs different fee structures, the average tuition fee paid by an IITian in 1 year is 50,000 rupees and another 50,000 for facilities like lodging, food, internet, etc. According to Mr.KapilSibals peculiar calculations, IITs spend 2 lakh rupees per annum on every student and 1.5 lakh rupees is subsidised by the government. It does seems odd that while taking the students expenditure, our HRD minister counts only the tuition fee whereas when calculating the governments expenditure, he takes into account the living conditions and facilities as well. Further, Mr.Sibalneither mentions whether this rule is applicable only to the undergraduate students, as his terms and conditions do not seem to consider the post-graduate facilitated population of IITs; nor does he indicate from which batch of IITians will this rule be applicable. If applied for students who were already in IITs before the decision was taken, it would be as good as luring the cream of the country by a dream of world class education and put a load of debt in their name without any consideration of their conditions or opinion. Taking into consideration only the undergraduate IITians and assuming the bill would be applicable to every student who is an IITian on the day the bill is passed (because lets face it, everyone likes money fast), a student in a 4 year course will be in a debt of 6 lakh while those in 5 year courses would be in a debt of 7.5 lakhs as soon as they receive their degree. However, this rule will be exempted from students who wish to pursue higher education in IITs or become professors at IITs. This is said to be done with a motive of promoting higher education in IITs. It is not clear whether the government actually wants to promote higher education or just realises that a student

wishing to become a professor would simply not be able to pay back to his alma mater because the job does not offer that opportunity. Also, this rule is applicable only to the general category students who represent 50.5% of the student community at IITs thanks to the caste based reservation system. Could it be possible that Mr.Sibal took into account the tuition fee of the reserved category which led to the fluctuation in his calculations? It just makes you want to be an SC, ST or OBC where you can score half the marks a general category student scores, get into an IIT of your choice, have a waivered fee after the regular subsidiary by the government and enjoy the fact that you are above the load your peers have of a debt imposed by the government. Mr.Sibal is considerable to put the burden of the debt off the parents so the student will have his loan meter clicking only after he/she secures a job. In this way it will be notified to the employer of the ward that his employee has to pay back a sum of 7 lakh rupees ($14,000) to the IIT from which the employee has come. In some cases, this is more than the annual salary of the IITian (without deducting the taxes). And Mr.Sibal expects the employer to be completely content with such a situation where if he employs the brightest mind in the country, he comes under a debt immediately. Perhaps Mr.Sibal gets the idea from the Congress where you are happy to put completely vulnerable people in offices of responsibility and then expect the system to work perfectly. I would also bring to the attention that this happened when the finance ministry sanctioned an excess budget of 200 Crores ($40 Million) for IIT Kharagpur. And then Government says that if becomes difficult for them to subsidise the IITs. And this happens in a country where the words budget and Government never miss the presence of the word scam. Being a student of IIT Kharagpur myself, Id like to discuss more on the topic in a later section. Id like to bring the readers attention to the living conditions of the IITians for which they are expected to pay a sum of 2 lakh rupees an year. After the increase in seats of IITs, the strength has doubled in a span of 5 years while the infrastructure failed to do so. Today IITians spend the first few years in jam-packed rooms where there is no space to walk after a bed has been shoved in the room for all boarders. Many-atimes these students have to share a bed for entire months. Classes are jam-packed and there is a shortage of equipment and space in the laboratories since those laboratories were not constructed to handle only a small population. A major reason why the bright minds of the country wish to join IITs is the fact that in IITs, everything from accommodation to education is subsidised. In lack of this facility, a student might want to prefer going to a private college such as BITS or VIT which offer comforts in line with the fee taken. Besides it is not a well-hidden fact that IITians learn hardly anything in their classrooms from the professors but learn from the intellectually stimulating environment the best minds from across the

country create. Many of these minds would rather stay in some low-grade engineering college than dare to pay 7 lakh rupees in lieu of the IIT education. IITs were created in order to provide worldclass education at subsidised rates but in the last few years due to the aforesaid policies, IITs are failing to do so. One might argue that this was done with an aim to uplift India using quality education while all IITians do is go abroad with their degrees and forget about helping India. Id ask them to check their facts. For every 500 rupees IITians earn abroad, 50 rupees are sent back to India. Vinod Gupta has spent millions to improve the standards of education in the country. IITians create more jobs than any other community in India. Most CEOs and MDs of Indian and MNCs are IITians who give back to the country more than Mr.Sibal will ever give. Many NGOs in India are managed single-handedly by IITians. Not only in the corporate world, but IITians are taking India to the world in terms of culture through literature, poetry, music and theatre. Yes, IITians do prefer to live abroad and help their country scarcely, that I because after a hard life of 25 years, when an IITian tries to start a company, he prefers help to the needy from bribe to the greedy. 2. Change in Engineering Entrance Examination format Proposals state the abolishment of the IIT-JEE, AIEEE and similar well-known examinations and have a nationalised exam for all engineering colleges on a national level. This is to be implemented by 2013. Further, this selection procedure would consider a students class XII board result. I have one question. Mr.Sibal, did you fail in your IIT-JEE exam? As the HRD minister of India, which is effectively the post of the Education minister of India you might be aware that IIT-JEE has a brand name which reaches out to the world. There have been studies and documentaries on this particular examination and when companies come to recruit IITians, they are not looking for people who have spent 4 years in IITs. They come for students who have passed that illustrious examination. The placement statistics of any IIT will tell you the difference in the demand for M. Tech IITians and B. Tech IITians. Adobe has once refused to consider Dual Degree students as there was confusion whether the students have come into IITs via IIT-JEE or GATE. Also, according to another survey, the alumni who keep the head of IITs high in their respective communities would not have been IITians in the first place had their XIIth marks been considered. 80% of the IIT alumni are known to have scored below 90% marks in their board examinations. You claim that IIT education has gone only to the elite due to the increasing coaching culture and a common entrance test will give you a chance to counter this. Ill let you know that coaching centres are much more flexible than your ministry and will easily adapt to a new syllabus at the same high fees and train the same elite population to get into colleges of their choice. You may say that you wish to decrease the coaching culture because you do not like to see quality education being passed on in this country, because the argument of a common test to counter coaching culture is nothing but a momentary inconvenience to the coaching system. The quality and quantity of students from the coaching centres will remain unchanged.

You again argue that the US system with the Scholastic Aptitude Test works with a common entrance exam. And some day Id ask you to speak to an average American and try to compare his IQ with that of a normal Indian. Even though they might make better educational policies than you, the brain of an average adult American is as much developed as that of a 10 year old Indian child. Also, you model your policy of reclaiming the IIT expenditure from the student on the US model of keeping a database of students and a track of their employment. You must also realise that the US doesnt use wizards or warlocks to keep such a track but maintains an efficient database of all the citizens. This takes a process of 10-15 years by when youll be out of office, or with some luck, maybe even dead. Just saying that your policy is modelled on the US framework doesnt mean you can overlook the supporting issues. Lastly, different institutes have different needs according to which different tests are taken. IITs test the students on a different level than Techno India, Kolkata would. To generalise a common entrance exam would be taking the independence from the college to select their wards which will add to the career counselling confusion which lies in millions of young minds today. 3. Increase in Research An empowered task force will be constituted for implementations of the Kakodkar Committee for expanding the research output of IITs to 10,000 PhD graduates annually from around 1,000 presently by 2020. As for the faculty shortage, it would be enhanced to 16,000 with an additional 4,000 to be appointed every year. Mr.Sibal, you need to understand the difference between scholars and cattle. PhD students are not grass which can be grown on a patch of land and be distributed. It is understandable that you never had access to such high levels of education so youd be unaware of the education system but Id like to tell you that to earn one PhD it takes years of hard work and research before a doctorate is awarded to a pupil. Assuming your 15 IITs produce 10,000 scholars an year. This would mean about 670 scholars per IIT assuming all IITs produce the same number of scholars. Of the 15 departments an average IIT has, each department would then be producing 44 PhDs an year. This is almost equal to the number of undergraduates awarded their degree in a year. Now would you assume that an undergraduate and a PhD student will take the same amount of attention from the professors? If you do, you might also think upon the quality of the scholar produced. Ultimately, this useless scholar would go to prominent research labs of India and abroad and will demean the name of IITs and India. FYI, there are around 10 PhD scholars from a department in IITs and year. And this is a LARGE number. Coming to professors, applying the same mathematics, youd need about 70 professors in every department. That is about double the number of students in a batch in a department. And you plan on dropping in 4,000 professors every year. Are you so confident that youd need such a large quantity every year? Do you think 4,000 professors will quit their jobs every year? Are you going to provide them such conditions that they wont survive IITs for more than a year? Do you plan on making every Indian an IIT professor for a day? Professors are not mangoes which grow on trees Mr.Sibal. They are gems and while finding gems you need to go through a lot of coal. We students often find that coal in our classrooms and it burns

us up. Mr.Sibal, you should attend the first year classes of IITs and see for yourself what the professors youre charging 2 lakh rupees for are like. After that if you are awake to reconsider your decisions, ask a 1st year student on the bench beside you to help you frame the policy. He can even take care of your spelling and punctuation errors. 4. Reducing IIT Suicides Seriously? Even now? Dont you think you should discuss something of more consequence in your meetings rather than the same old issue of suicides? Its been several years now and you have taken all steps you need to reduce suicides. Setting up a new task force which will be paid by the students 2 lakh rupees per annum is not required by us. Wed rather have better living conditions, better teachers, better laboratories, less reservation and more genuine concern from you than a task force which will only be responsible for collecting their cheque for the special cervices. Note from the Author This section was included after I read the request of the directors of IITs to have more financial authority so that they may have the flexibility to take timely decisions. Id like to ask you to change your own policies first. I am a part of a society in your institution which is in need of money. The hierarchy youve set up takes the entire year to bring down money from your Gymkhana. Your secretaries and General Secretaries turn a deaf ear when approached for this problem. When nagged, they assure that the money would come within a week. If the President of the Gymkhana is approached, he is always busy and likes to shout at troubled society members for entertainment. Hed rather have the societies closed down than give them the financial flexibility. He asks us to give a budget at the beginning of the year but if approached at the end of the year for the money, he says the money has been taken up by some other society. The money which was supposed to be allotted to my society! The G. Sec says the Gymkhana is bankrupt. This in the year when 200 crore rupees were sanctioned got the institute. Where did the money go? How much can you swallow? Didnt you feel any shame asking for financial authority while denying it to your students at the same time? Or were you not aware of the situation in the institute you are responsible to maintain. I refrained from mentioning my name in the article because I know the consequences if I am found out. There have been incidents in the past where institute authorities have checked rooms of clean people in the past and found narcotic substances in the room. The students are thrown out of the institute, blacklisted and careers and lives go down the drain. I do not wish to be a part of that group. Yes, I am a scared selfish man but Im not afraid to accept who I am. But this write-up is not about who I am; it is about the situation my alma mater is in today. I do my bit by wielding the pen. Would you do yours?