IITs find generating funds on their own leads to skewed priorities in education

DYING DREAMS: An acute cash crunch is eating away into the edifice of the IITsWhen Anil Chandra graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in the mid '70s, he remembers feeling rueful about leaving the place. He classifies those undergraduate years as the "high point" of his life's graph - spent memorising hydrocarbon chains, cleaning laboratory beakers and watching awesome sunsets on a sprawling campus built on the edge of the tapering Aravallis.Life was good - the faculty was excellent, the resources great, and that "IIT stamp" guaranteed an exceptional placement. But after his graduation he lost contact, and little nuggets of information coming in about his institute were only vaguely interesting, like reading about a bank robbery in a distant town. Now, however, with two smart sons, one of whom aspires to get into an IIT next year, he suddenly found himself acutely interested in what was going on. Make that horrified. He found that a persistent resource crunch, like an army of termites, was eating away into the edifice of all the IITs. Most core laboratories - inundated with obsolete equipment - needed urgent upgradation. Libraries had drastically cut down on journals. Hostels were crumbling and rooms in short supply. Non-faculty staff was being shed. Loans were being taken to build hostels or fund research projects. And professors, instead of teaching, were busy raising money. Worse, even as infrastructure almost remained unchanged over the decades, students had been steadily increasing. So had the fees. While a student, Chandra had paid only a few hundred rupees as the base fee per year..preferred-source-banner{ margin-top: 10px; margin-bottom:10px;}ImpactMost core labs are loaded with obsolete equipment.Libraries have been severely affected; big cutback on foreign journals.With increase of students, hostels are crumbling and in short supply, lecture theatres are crowded.Faculty is disheartened and say they are losing the inspiration to teach.Last year, the basic fee was hiked from Rs 2,000 to Rs 15,000 and is expected to be Rs 20,000 next year. Add to that the cost of food, books and other supplies and it meant the actual amount his son would pay stood at about Rs 40,000 per year. "So much for so little. I felt a surge of anger on seeing this. Why are they killing all these premier institutions?" asks Chandra.Why indeed? The IITs, called "centres of excellence", were always the crown of the Indian education system, with almost four lakh youngsters dreaming of making it and only the cream - about 2,000 or so - actually managing to do so. Exclusivity has always been a hallmark with IITs, and the ongoing higher education resource crunch, one felt, wouldn't really apply to them. But two things went against them. One, the major shift of priorities (read money) in the early '90s to primary education left very little for even the IITs. Second, in an era of liberalisation, economic mandarins - with World Bank reports under their arm - suddenly started terming higher education as one of the "nonmerit" goods. In simple words, higher education became a commodity from which only an individual derived benefit, and not society as a whole. As a result, a slow, withering resource crunch left the IITs cutting corners wherever they could. It was clear that this couldn't go on for long."The resource crunch has affected the quality of our institutions."C.R. Muthukrishnan Dy Director, IIT ChennaiFinally, about three years ago, the IITs themselves took the initiative to stem the rot. If the money from the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had dried up, then why not try and make money on your own - be the masters of your own destiny? Till then, the system of funding involved the IITs working out a budget every year and fighting its case with a tight-fisted MHRD. The little money that IITs made through research projects or consultancy work was subtracted from the government grant. But now, after much thought, a brand new funding pattern was devised. Everyone put on their thinking caps and the way they looked at it, three partners benefited from an IIT education - the student, the industry and society at large. And really, all three should pay. For the student, the fee was hiked. For society, the MHRD said it would continue supporting IITs financially, but grant only a fixed amount (what it paid in 1992-93, which amounts to about Rs 200 crore for all IITs). The deficit, everybody decided, would have to come with the IITs wooing the industry for research projects and consultancy work. Added to all this was an incentive. If an IIT managed to also save money and put it in a corpus, then the MHRD, under the new scheme, would give a matching grant. But only the interest from this corpus could be used by the IIT. "It was like a challenge. This new scheme keeps us on our toes and makes us work much harder," says V.S. Raju, director, IIT Delhi.Challenge or not, it has in the past three years opened up a whole new ethos in the history of IITs. Today, everyone is on the lookout for money. Professors are urged to bring in consultancies (last year IIT Powai made Rs 4 crore this way) and bag research projects (IIT Kanpur earned Rs 11 crore last year). Infrastructure is being rented out - for instance, inside IIT Delhi, IBM has opened up a Solutions Research Centre and along with doling out donations, pays Rs 70 lakh per year as rent for about 7,000 sq ft of space. Loans are being taken - both IIT Delhi and Kanpur have taken soft loans from ICICI (Rs 9 crore and Rs 6 crore, respectively) to fund industry research projects. IIT Delhi also plans to take a Rs 4.5 crore loan from HUDCO to build hostels. Fee has been hiked, students increased to bring in more money and foreign students, who pay in dollars, are being wooed. On-campus services like seminar halls, grounds, guest houses are also being let out to outside organisations. "So much so that the IITs have become tent houses," says an infuriated professor who, because of a prime ministerial visit, was asked to open his laboratory for sniffer dogs one Sunday.SolutionsMust learn to attract consultancy work and research projects from industry.Contract services like labs, libraries to MNCs.Increase overheads on sponsored research, forge joint ventures, tap alumni and admit foreign students.Take soft loans to build infrastructure.But more than angry professors, the new scheme has put IITs in a transitional phase with the pros and cons of the new funding pattern being intensely debated by the academia. "We have to win projects from government agencies ... for which the IITs must create capability and establish credibility," says D.K. Ghosh, registrar, IIT Powai. This entails a widening of horizons, working closely with the industry, learning their constraints and sharpening problem-solving skills. It also means cutting down the flab that has accumulated during years of dependence on the MHRD. To that extent, the scheme comes as a welcome challenge. "But what I fear most is that eventually it could lead to skewed priorities while imparting education," says D. Nagchoudhuri, head, electrical engineering, IIT Delhi.BREAKING EVEN: On-campus services are let out to MNCs who pay rent for spaceHe explains that every subject today has areas which are hot and some which are not so hot. Industry, focused on making a profit, will find only certain kinds of projects in which it sees a prospect of making money. "But what happens to the other areas? Aren't we here to give a wellrounded education?"Already, while specialised laboratories may - because of external funding - have state-of-the-art equipment, the core laboratories are close to becoming obsolete. Worse, the social fabric of teaching faculties seems divided among those who can bag consultancies and those who can't. "Almost 80 per cent of the faculty isn't among those who bag consultancy or research projects," says Dinesh Mohan, a professor in bio-medical engineering. With the system projecting those who bring in money as saviours, others feel neglected."By refusing IITs money, the government is destroying future technological base."Dinesh Mohan, professor, Biomedical engineering, IIT DelhiAdmits K.A. Padmanabhan, director, IIT Kanpur: "This is unfortunate and we are trying to curb it." The constant refrain among those who don't readily get consultancies or research projects is: "Should a teacher be spending time trying to generate funds?" Yes, point out most of the directors, this is a sign of the times. No, say a lot of teachers who feel that in all this rush for money, the basic motivation to teach gets lost.Yet, the biggest predicament the IITs face is the fear that they can't get enough money from industry. Professors point out that Indian industry largely doesn't have a vibrant research base, preferring instead to buy hand-me-down technologies from the West. Says Nagchoudhuri: "Original ideas do come to us. But we find Indian industry lacks the basic infrastructure to follow up the idea." In the end, very little research work is done for private companies. Much in contrast to the West. In fact, the kind of money that some US technology institutes make from industry is always thrown at the faces of the directors. Points out Mohan: "This is foolish. The US funded their universities completely until they and the industry came up to a certain level. Don't compare them to us."SORRY STATE:With dilapidated laboratories, the IITs do not yet have the capabilityMoney from the industry right now comes from consultancy work. "But even here very little constitutes actual profit," says IIT Kharagpur Director Amitabh Ghosh. Not many companies are willing to pay 15 to 20 per cent overhead charges. As a result, even though IIT Kharagpur bagged Rs 17 crore in consultancy work last year, the money saved was negligible. Then again, while IITs in metropolitan cities attract industry support, places like IIT Guwahati could get left out in the cold. Set up so that a neglected place like the North-east could also get an IIT, this fledgling institute is expected to grow up to a point where it will need Rs 40 crore every year. For that, a corpus of Rs 350 crore is needed. "But with oil and tea being the only industries here, our sources are limited," says Director D.N. Buragohain. A good indicator, right now, to assess whether industry support to the IITs is coming can be gauged from the corpus that they were supposed to build up in the new funding scheme. MHRD officials admit the figures are below expectations and for most range between Rs 3 crore and Rs 4 crore. Adds a senior official: "We are reviewing this and are trying to work out new schemes for better funding." The other contentious issue is the hiking of fees and increasing the intake of students. About two years ago, the MHRD decided that "since infrastructure in the IITs was not utilised to capacity" it should increase the number of seats so that in about five years the number of students could be doubled. It would also rake in the money. The credibility to undertake consultancy work that brings in the much-needed fundsA recent study conducted showed that if infrastructure - like laboratories, lecture halls and hostels - was boosted by about 25 per cent, the intake could be doubled. But as students steadily increase, the promise of money to boost infrastructure still hasn't been kept. Says Padmanabhan: "They have yet to keep their part of the bargain."As a result, teachers now complain that classes are overcrowded and unruly. In fact, the faculty forum in IIT Delhi brought out a white paper which complained of huge classes of 85 to 90 where students often stand or sit on the floor, of a blackboard that isn't visible to many and of the teacher's voice not being audible enough. Says a professor: "Earlier, I knew my class individually. Now, it's like teaching a huge crowd of strangers." The Punnayya Committee report on resource generation for universities talks about hiking the fee to about 25 per cent of the total running cost spent on a student's education. But engineering degrees are expensive - the money spent on a BTech student every year is Rs 1 lakh which means Rs 4 lakh for four years for a BTech degree. A growing number of faculty members feel the fee shouldn't be increased. True, there are checks and balances to maintain equity. For instance, any poor student who makes it past the joint entrance examination is assured of a fee waiver. But there is controversy as to what defines a poor student. ConcernsThe pressure on professors to generate money hampers teaching.Recessive industry with poor R&D can't support IITs.Fees hiked over seven times in two years leads to bias against poor students.IITs are becoming less attractive to PhD students with a 50 per cent slowdown.Right now, the rules categorise any family whose annual income is less than Rs 50,000 as poor. But take a family who earns Rs 1 lakh a year. Spending about 40 per cent of your income on a child is tough, considering there might be other children. Adds Raju: "This needs to be reviewed."Lastly, there is an overall concern about a huge slowdown (almost 50 per cent) of PhD students in all the IITs. Academics link this to the high fees, low research stipends and the overall lack of good research facilities. But MHRD officials refute this by saying that globally too students have stopped going in for research, opting instead to get lucrative jobs. But in the argument, what gets lost is the elementary objective of the IITs when they were established in the early '60s - to build institutes that generate original thought. As far back as that, our forefathers had realised the need to bring together the cream of professors and PhD students so they could create technologies that would capture lightning in a bottle. But that ethos is slowly dying. Says C.R. Muthukrishnan, deputy director of IIT Chennai: "Today we are becoming less attractive." And that magic sheen of the IITs is slowly fading.- with Udayan Namboodiri, Smruti Koppikar, L.R. Jagadheesan and Avirook SenPublished By: AtMigration Published On: Apr 13, 1998--- ENDS ---

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IITs find generating funds on their own leads to skewed priorities in education

Faced with a long-standing resource crunch, these premier institutions find that generating funds on their own leads to skewed priorities in education.

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