The Great American Bargain

“For most of their fifty years, these IITs were one of the greatest bargains America ever made.”- Thomas L. Friedman

The American journalist in his bestselling book, The World Is Flat mentions that how Indian Institute of Technology(IIT) have been instrumental in giving India what is called her Silicon Valley, namely Bangalore oh wait, Bengaluru. But what the Pulitzer Prize winner overlooked was the inefficiency of the IITians to solve the problems of the farmers in Mandya, a district adjacent to the IT city where one farmer committed suicide every 12 hours at the same time when he was writing his book.

When Jawaharlal Nehru, creator of IIT envisaged these institutes to be “symbolical of the changes that are coming to India”, little would he have known then, that his change makers were more interested in the development of what was already developed. Since 1953, 25,000 IITians have immigrated to America. They have a huge hand in creating 15 percent of the jobs in places of power like the Silicon Valley of California along with their Chinese colleagues.  

The Indian Government paid 80 percent of the cost of education of these exported whiz kids (and continues to do so), who came largely from the top 10 percent income group in India. Disproportionate, generous grants are still given to these “Institutes of national importance” in a country where the number of children who cannot read or write is the largest in the world. Not to forget, according to the UNESCO, India also has the lowest expenditure on higher education per student (US$406). But obviously, the rest of the country’s youth cannot be par with these 27,500 students just because they cleared an exam to fulfil their great American dream at a subsidised rate.

Where only 0.37 percent of the country’s Gross Development Product (GDP) is spent on higher education, IITs have miraculously produced more millionaires than any other graduate institute, per capita as reported by Salon magazine. These intellectually elite kids also enjoy a faculty-to-student ratio between 1:6 and 1:8, regardless of the fact that most of the primary schools in nation struggle to maintain a ratio of 1:40. In fact, till 1989, according to the All India Education Survey, 60 percent of primary schools had one teacher to take care of five classes but our IITs remained completely immune even back then.

When IIT is often described as “Harvard, Princeton and MIT, put together”, a question arises whether IITs are actually a part of India which ranks 105 out of 129 countries as per the United Nations Education for All report. Looks like our IITians were busy day dreaming (and we know what they were dreaming of) when President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, addressed them on the first convocation of the second IIT, IIT Bombay saying, “The strength of a country is judged not by the number of millionaires it has created, but by the poverty it has eliminated.”

In September this year, the IIT Council somehow realised that the subsidies given were not as productive as they should have been and proposed that 25 percent of the students who pass out (other than SCs/STs and OBCs) who can afford the hike, will pay Rs. 6 lakh back to their institutions, which was earlier paid by the country’s tax payers. And we are left to wonder why no proposals for people who join a foreign firm in a foreign country have been made. May be the Council has some dreams for itself as well.

The Government of India is also working on opening nine more IITs and plans to make National Institute of Technology (NIT) function on the same lines are next son the list . No concrete solutions for increasing the average time an Indian kid spends in school, which at present is just 4.4 years have been made till now, though. But we have always been a friendly nation and the progress of those millions of kids who struggle to reach their schools, which are mostly non-operational, can wait.  The board rooms in Delhi don’t have the time to work on increasing the average efficiency of our school system which is less than 5 percent. Of course, Mr. Kapil Sibbal is occupied with a more important job; giving wings to the IT geniuses to make economies boom while people can sink.