The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Session probes secret behind IITs’ success

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Session probes secret behind IITs’ success

Special Correspondent

Panelists answer queries on the first day of PanIIT 2008

CHENNAI: “What is special about the IITs and what is the reason for their successes” was one of the questions fielded to the panel of directors and representatives of various IITs in a session at the first day of the PanIIT 2008 on Thursday.

While the IIT Impact Study talked about the contributions of IITians to the Indian and the global economy, this question has been repeatedly raised especially in the context of the enormous attention the IITs have received over the last few years.

“Every student has similar talents and at least 30,000 of the 3-lakh students who write JEE are as capable as the 5,000 or so who finally manage to get in. The difference is essentially in the atmosphere of the IITs, which resembles a gurukul and provides for interaction between students from different cultural groups from across the country,” Dr. Chakraborty, representing IIT - Kharagpur on the panel said.

The government’s move to open Central Universities along the same lines and also more IITs would actually benefit more students but it needs to be carefully planned to avoid taxing existing resources, the experts said. In fact, the panel went one step ahead and said that internationalisation of the higher education system would help as Indian students and faculty interacted with students and faculty from outside the country, they said.

M.S.Ananth, director, IIT - Madras, said that the influx of foreign minds would help eliminate cultural prejudices among students of a relatively more homogeneous community, freeing them from their inhibitions. He also said that he strongly advocated the introduction of medicine and arts courses in IITs to develop “both brain activity in both the left and right halves.”

‘JEE is not perfect’

Questions about the JEE and professional governance of IITs were also raised by Pradeep Gupta, session moderator, and directors clarified some of the problems with the system. While the JEE was not perfect, it was fair and unbiased with respect to individuals. Coaching centres did play a problematic role in some cases with emphasis on problem-solving instead of conceptualisation, and there were efforts to redress this issue, they said.

Anil Kakodkar, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said that professional governance was important to achieve the success of IITs as premier institutions in the future, but responded to calls for a sea-change by saying that IITs needed to function within their specified framework.

To change the framework itself was another problem that had to be deliberated over time, but IITs could continue to contribute significantly to India’s success by ensuring efficiency within their framework.

As the directors’ deliberation happened amid all the sensation created about what is perhaps the largest such conference in Chennai, Dr. Ananth sounded a note of caution: “We have flourished until now in a state of benign neglect. But recent developments over the last decade have put us in the limelight for a number of reasons and that is a double-edged sword. We have to be careful about it leads to.”

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