‘Indian industry not sophisticated enough to absorb IIT-quality engineer’

IIT Kanpur alumnus and founding Dean of the Indian School of Business The government is expected to finalise the new education policy in the coming year. A new committee has been set up to decide the contours of the policy. Experts and educationists have been arguing for more autonomy for institutions of national importance like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). In this context, PRAMATH SINHA, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and founding Dean of the Indian School of Business, spoke to Anjuli Bhargava on why very few IITians who stay in India remain engineers and why the IITs of today are no longer the IITs of yesterday. Excerpts: more than once a year. Consolidate the plethora of entrance examinations. Revenues of the coaching industry are many X of the budgets of IITs themselves.

Create something like Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in the US. Look at the class 12 marks, do a SAT like examination and like some of the IIMs have started to do, give weightage to other factors. The IIMs have started giving weightage to interviews, work experience, a whole range of other factors are being looked at now. Give autonomy to IITs and they will start innovating on admissions themselves. How come none of the IITians I have met over the years — and I have met a few hundred — are engineers anymore? They are some of the best minds but they are not engineers. Why? This is absolutely true and there is a reason for it. Why do our engineers do so well in the US and overseas and they mostly opt out of engineering if they remain in India? I believe I have found the answer to that. This is primarily because in India we don’t have choice or flexibility in choosing what we want to study or major in.

Let me give you my own example here. I wanted to study at IIT Kanpur. I ranked 994 in JEE. For IIT Kanpur it was a low rank and the best I could manage was metallurgical engineering. I wasn’t considered good enough for anything else. I had a miserable time for a while at IIT Kanpur — I had no interest in the subject but was majoring in it just to be at IIT Kanpur.

It doesn’t happen anywhere in the world. Say you are good enough to get into Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and then MIT says you can only do this; you are not good enough to major in anything else.

I went onto Penn (University of Pennsylvania) after and they said you can study what you want. I switched to mechanical engineering for my Masters and then did a PhD in robotics under a thesis supervisor from computer science. I went on to be an engineering academic and researcher because I could pursue what I wanted and became really interested in the subject.

Also, when the IITs were set up, there were just a handful of professions —engineering, civil service and medicine. That is no longer the case. The best and brightest minds study at the IITs — even if they didn’t want to end up as engineers. The IITs remain the best educational institutions in the country so the best students go there regardless of what they study. So, the best people want to go to the best institutions regardless of what they teach. Just as I did not go to IIT to become a metallurgical engineer and I have never worked as a metallurgist in my life. But, I spent four precious years studying it.

So, hardly any IIT student gets what is called a “core” job in India after finishing IIT today. Moreover, in many disciplines, the Indian industry is not sophisticated enough to absorb an IITquality engineer — you may study aeronautical engineering at IIT Kanpur but which aeronautical company in India will hire you? So, most of them go abroad or just quit engineering and get into software or management.

Moreover, if employers want a good person, they take a good person regardless of what he or she specialised in. So, an Amazon, Flipkart, Google and so on are not hiring only computer scientists; they are just hiring smart guys. A McKinsey is not looking to hire an engineer out of IIT; just a smart guy. And these are the most sought-after, aspirational companies for IIT graduates.