Impolitic, perhaps, but speaking inconvenient truths
No stranger to controversy, Jairam Ramesh, India’s maverick environment minister, has once again raised hackles. Attending the launch event last week of the National Center for Marine Biodiversity, he was asked by journalists why the research unit is being established jointly with Reliance Industries, the country’s largest private-sector concern. He replied that a world-class research outfit could not be built in a “governmental set up.” He then took aim at the country’s premier technology and business management institutions, the state-run Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, stating that:
“There is hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs. The faculty in the IIT 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.”
A tempest immediately ensued. Inside the Union government, Ramesh’s Cabinet colleague, water resources minister Salman Khurshid, defended Ramesh’s right to voice his concerns. On the other hand, Kapil Sibal, the reform-minded minister for human resource development (whose portfolio includes the university system), was more ambivalent, at once dismissing the validity of the remarks while also conceding that Ramesh may have a point. The Bharatiya Janata Party, the main national opposition party, jumped into the fray, expressing support for the institutions and demeaning Ramesh’s professional competence. Leading newspapers were soon alive with dueling opinion pieces.
The wide-ranging reactions to Ramesh’s comments are surprising, since his criticism of the IIT system contained nothing that other high-ranking officials in the Union government have not already said. Indeed, Vice President Mohammed Hamid Ansari, a former vice-chancellor of the prestigious Aligarh Muslim University, delivered precisely the same message in addressing IIT-Delhi’s convocation last August.
Like Ramesh, he emphasized that the country has few institutions with strong international standing. Among the IITs, only those in Bombay and Delhi are listed in the 2009 Times Higher Education ranking of the world’s top 50 engineering and information technology institutions. But no Indian school, including any of the IITs, ranks among the top 100 universities in the widely-consulted Shanghai Jiao Tong university index or in the Times Higher Education (THE) ranking of the world’s top 200 universities. The first Indian school appearing in the Jiao Tong listing, in the 303-401 tier, is the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore; the first IIT mentioned, in the 402-501 tier, is the one at Kharagpur. The first Indian institution listed in the THE scores is IIT Bombay, ranked at 163th; IIT Delhi is ranked 181st.
Ansari noted that on the basis of research output – whether measured by publications, literature citations, or patent applications and awards – India’s engineering schools fare poorly even in comparison to other developing countries. He also bemoaned that less than one percent of IIT graduates choose to pursue post-graduate studies within the IIT system, while tens of thousands of others have expressed their lack of confidence in the state of Indian technical education by flocking to masters and doctoral programs in the United States. (Read the full text of Ansari’s remarks here.)
In 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s scientific advisor similarly warned that research output from Indian universities is “hitting an all-time low. They are unable to perform and compete. Moreover, even our top institutions are not performing well in terms of research papers and the number of research students they train [emphasis added].” Mr. Singh, too, has focused on the need to improve the IITs’ research output, as have recent high-level commissions chaired by P. Rama Rao and Anil Kakodkar.
Belying the country’s high-tech image, Indian faculty members, both at the IITs and elsewhere, publish a comparatively low number of research articles in leading international journals. The world’s premier journal in the computer science field, The Journal of the ACM, has for a number of years been unable to publish Indian submissions on quality grounds. The Infosys Science Foundation in 2009 failed to find a worthy recipient for its inaugural prize honoring an Indian researcher in the field of engineering and computer science. But perhaps the most decisive indicator of the IIT system’s health is that, as Vice President Ansari notes, a large percentage of its graduates vote with their feet by pursuing advanced studies abroad.
Part of the challenge that the IITs and other Indian universities confront is the lack of resources. Total outlays on the higher education system are much lower than in many other comparable countries, affecting not only the capacity for teaching but also research. According to UNESCO statistics, per-student public spending on higher education is nearly seven times greater in China than in India. And while the level of research and development expenditures was similar to China’s about a decade ago, China’s spending has recently skyrocketed past India’s.
Budget deficiencies result in the low salaries paid to faculty members even at India’s most elite state-run schools, a condition that prompted IIT faculty two years to stage a hunger strike in protest. Given the higher income potential offered by the private sector, the IITs are plagued by large faculty shortages – between 15 and 40 percent depending on institution.
However, as in so many other state-run activities, the real hindrance on excellence in the IIT system is the nature of the Indian state itself: heavily bureaucratic, excessively centralized, enamored with endless red tape and stiflingly regulation, resistant to initiative and creativity. Due to the heavy-handedness of federal and state-level officials, entrepreneurial spirit – so evident in other sectors of Indian life – is altogether lacking in the higher education system. As a result, interaction between universities and the private sector is weak, including in the critical technology fields on which the country’s future supposedly rests. For example, university curricula are not synchronized with employer needs, forcing companies to spend their own resources on remedial education and training programs. Student projects usually do not reflect existing conditions of technology use. As Rafiq Dossani observes in his recent book, India Arriving, nearly all of the final, fourth-year projects by computer science undergraduates are conducted in university labs, not in a corporate research environment, as is more typical in the West. Although all of the country’s elite technical institutions have established incubators or science and technology parks, no cutting-edge start-up has yet to emerge from them. Unlike in the United States, where university researchers often are involved in start-up ventures, spin-off is not common in India. This is in great contrast to China, where thousands of high-tech companies (including Lenovo) have been spun off from universities and public research laboratories.
The university-industry disjuncture has serious ramifications, both for the IITs and for the nation’s development prospects. It contributes mightily to the atrophy of faculty skills and to the nation’s human capital potential. As Sam Pitroda, chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, reported three years ago, the country has “already lost a couple of generations of talent” due to the separation. It also helps explain the reason the country has a low capacity to adopt and adapt foreign technology, and why it is still far from being a genuine fount of technological innovation.
Ramesh’s comments have bruised many egos. But instead of paroxysms of hurt pride, a constructive reaction would entail asking why the system of academic governance cannot be liberalized in the same way government constraints on innovation were dismantled in other parts of the economy 20 years ago. Only when this occurs will the country truly be able to proclaim itself the knowledge hub of the 21st century.
UPDATE (JUNE 18, 2011):
Two new reports reveal how far Indian universities – even the country’s most prestigious institutions – remain from the global top ranks. Not a single Indian school, including the vaunted IITs, placed well in the just-released QS Asian University rankings. And only four business schools appear in a ranking of the world’s top 500 business programs that is based on the output of faculty research. By comparison, 23 Chinese schools made the cut, including a few in Hong Kong. Significantly, no Indian institution placed in the top 100. Equally noteworthy is that the top Indian appearance is made not by one of the government-run Indian Institutes of Management, but by the privately-operated Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, which has been in existence for only a decade.
Also noteworthy is an opinion piece by Mohandas Pai, former human resources chief at Infosys, the iconic IT company. He laments the broad decline of higher education institutions and argues that the IIT system is neither meeting the country’s human capital needs nor producing the kind of PhD students India requires.
