More seats at the IITs: The Wages of Populism

The council of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has decided to increase student intake in the IITs by 60 per cent, according to a report in Mint, published Tuesday.

While no time frame for this increase in seats was cited in the report, the decision, if true, appears more populist than practical.

The minister in charge of technical education in the central government - in this case Union Human Resource Development Minister Pallam Raju - is part of the Council, and such statements of intent always vibe well before the general elections, due next year.

The 2008 decision to increase the number of IITs also had distinct political undertones. There are 16 IITs now, nine of which began in or after 2008. The new IITs were announced by the late Minister of Human Resource Development Arjun Singh on March 28, 2008. A year later, in the 2009 general elections, the Congress emerged as the single largest party and formed the second United Progressive Alliance government.

Why is such a dramatic increase in intake not practical? Business Today, in its May 12 edition, had noted that the IIT Brand has been broken and one of the key reasons for it was the sudden expansion in their number. (See http://businesstoday.intoday.in/story/brand-iit-losing-sheen/1/194169.html)

Many of the new IITs (the ones at Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Ropar, Patna, Indore and Mandi) don't have adequate physical infrastructure. Neither have they enough teachers. The teacher-student ratio even in the older IITs is trending at 1:16 while ideally it should be 1:10. Quality recruitments have not kept pace with the sudden expansion in the number of seats.

In 2007, IITs had 5,537 seats. This jumped 74 per cent to 9,647 by 2012, with most of the expansion happening in the reserved categories. All this has resulted in a dilution in the quality of education imparted.

The IITs should perhaps focus more on quality than quantity. India produces enough engineers but only a handful are employable. Surveys have shown that only one in four engineers graduating from colleges is fit to be employed. If the country has to get back its lost growth momentum, it needs many more skilled and productive engineers to build its bridges, roads, power plants and airplanes.