As you all know, recently a planning has been done by Indian Government to execute a dozen more new IITs and IIMs in India.
Will this dilute the IIT/IIM brand? In my opinion, YES.
IIT/IIM in India stands for Top Quality Education – Great faculties, Great syllabus, Great students, Encourage Entrepreneurial and hard work.
There is still a huge scope for existing IITs/IIMs to perform well so that they get into Global ranks. Government should come up with solutions to help existing IITs/IIMs to reach higher ranks globally.
There are NITs in India. Some of the NITs are just good, not great. Government can do lot of work to make NITs become successful institutes. We have BITs in India. And BITS Pilani is the most admired even today. There can be an encouragement here to scale and improve the quality.
India has thousands of Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges. I feel some of these colleges are better than the Tier 1 colleges. A great help can be extended to create better Tier 2 colleges so that every rural and semi urban student gets a great opportunity to study and become a rock star engineer.
If IITs are required, let us add two or three and improve the quality first. Adding dozens will only lead to failure. It should not be so easy for all students to get into IIT without any preparation. Then it becomes one more institute to explore. Today I see there is huge investment in Infrastructure and that’s it. Media & Advertisements today, focus only on selling Institute's on high end infrastructure. Nowhere have I seen an Ad or College confidently saying they have a real great team of faculties. Most faculties have just passed out from engineering colleges where they studied or got hired through some influence. India is a country which has lot of experienced Engineers. A great faculty team can be created from this engineering crowd for every institute.
Along with Indian Government, even Management Team from these Top institutes should play an equal and vital role is influencing the working Engineering crowd to come and teach students. I am sure there will be a step by step algorithm to execute this task.
It’s time for India to open the eyes wide and take rational and logical decisions. Investing is one part, scaling-maintaining-enhancing is a much larger and difficult task. We have capabilities to create Stanford and MITs with existing institutes in India certainly.
I only pray that politics should not get into our education system evaluation.
I welcome comments and suggestions.
