IITs and IIMs: Yash Pal is wrong
In India, institutions of higher learning tend to deteriorate with time. The great universities of the past — Bombay, Madras and Calcutta — are today but pale shadows of their former selves. This hasn't happened with the IITs and IIMs. These institutions have retained their attractiveness to students and employers alike. The newer IITs and IIMs lag behind the older ones but are still preferred to most institutions outside the IIT/IIM fold.
The Yash Pal committee on higher education now wants the IITs and IIMs to develop into full-fledged universities. The committee is dead wrong. The IITs and IIMs have other priorities. Besides, replicating the IIT/IIM experience at universities may be infeasible.
We have seven IITs that admit about 10,000 students into their undergraduate programme and seven IIMs that admit 1,600 students for their post-graduate programme. These are pathetically small numbers in relation to the requirements of the economy. The total in any graduating batch across all IITs cannot meet the requirements of even one of our IT giants in a normal year.
So, one priority for IITs and IIMs is to scale up without compromising on quality. This is a challenge that neither the IITs nor IIMs have been able to crack so far. It required the introduction of OBC quotas to produce the first significant scaling up in years.
The IITs and IIMs say they face constraints of both physical and human infrastructure. But several proposals made for increasing capacity have not been given due importance: faculty working in shifts; creative use of IT; involvement of international faculty in teaching; reducing faculty time spent on administrative tasks; curtailing excessive time spent at some institutions on in-company training programmes.
Eight new IITs and seven new IIMs are to be set up in the Eleventh Plan. This is an acknowledgement of the difficulties in coaxing greater capacity out of the existing IITs and IIMs. Creating new IITs and IIMs may solve the problem of physical infrastructure but how can it address the faculty crunch?
Surprising as this may sound, it could. There is a large pool of NRIs keen to return to India. Many of them wish to return to their home towns, so setting up new IITs and IIMs could help. New institutions can offer better entry level positions and faster promotions than older ones. Entrenched interests at the older institutions are often an obstacle to attracting new faculty. So the new institutions hold out the promise of enhancing the faculty pool.
Still, the existing IITs and IIMs must do their best to increase capacity. This should be their first priority, not becoming full-fledged universities. Another priority is improving their standing as research institutions. So poor is the quality of teaching in higher education in India that the IITs and IIMs have made a mark through quality teaching alone. But this is not enough. They need to gain recognition in research. They must respond to emerging areas in the economy through the creation of high quality centres.
A better approach is to concentrate on the 14 new central universities the government proposes to set up. The government could contemplate a level of financial commitment higher than for ordinary universities but not of the same order as for IITs and IIMs.
Academic excellence is not achieved merely through higher funding. Our experience has been that unstinted financial support from government, with not too many questions asked, delivers results in areas that require focus — atomic energy, space research, defence applications, institutions of higher learning. This has helped produce excellence up to a certain level. But moving to the next level requires better governance.
This is required as much for the IITs and IIMs as for central universities. The RC Bhargava review committee on IIMs (2008) was of the view that there were shortcomings in governance in the IIMs and a certain lack of accountability in the system.
Better governance is not a matter of the government abdicating its monitoring role or exiting institutions of excellence. Far from it. State presence is not incompatible with academic excellence. In the US, there are several state universities — California, Texas, Ohio — that can give the best private universities a run for their money. It is all about putting in place the right governance structures.
Here are some suggestions. The IITs and IIMs have large, unwieldy boards. The Bhargava committee had rightly suggested that IIM boards be pruned from about 26 to 11 members. We need to define an appropriate composition for IIT/IIM boards, with the right balance between government representatives and independent members.
Chairmen and independent members of IIT/ IIM boards must selected by a distinguished Appointments Committee for Higher Education. The boards must lay down clear performance objectives for directors of IITs and IIMs and closely monitor performance. Not least, academic boards, no less than corporate boards, are prone to 'management capture'. So, board monitoring must be supplemented by periodic external audits by committees of eminent persons.
The IITs and IIMs should not aspire to become universities. They have other priorities. They must scale up as much as possible. They need to produce better research. They need to spread out into newer areas in their respective disciplines. To be able to do all this, they must first get their governance right.
(The author is professor, IIM Ahmedabad)
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