Inde – Challenge for India’s top schools

Challenge for India’s top schools
http://www.iht.com/
By Abhay Singh Bloomberg News Thursday, November 4, 2004
Varun Rao, 16, used to draw, play basketball and enjoy movies. But now the New Delhi resident is studying night and day in the hope of becoming one of the 2 percent of applicants who will be admitted to the Indian Institutes of Technology, whose seven campuses are the nation’s best schools for engineers and computer scientists.
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Rao would have a better shot at Harvard University, which accepted 1 in 10 undergraduate candidates for the year that began in September.
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"You get scolded if you go play sports: ‘What if you break your finger? How will you write your exam?"’ said Rao, whose mother is paying 45,000 rupees, or $982, for a two-year coaching course.
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Since 1951, when India converted a former jail into the first IIT in order to turn out engineers for the newly independent nation, the government-funded schools have developed the country’s brightest minds. While two-thirds of Indian secondary-school students drop out, the technology institutes and their alumni are icons, as well as fodder for psychological studies, novels and national debate.
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Graduates question whether the system benefits India or encourages flight abroad. The IITs themselves are struggling to compete with overseas universities, where research funding and professor salaries are more than 10 times higher than in India.
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Sandipan Deb, 41, an IIT graduate and author of "The IITians," said students who have spent years studying to gain admittance can be clueless about life off campus.
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"If you’ve just crammed since the age of 16 to get into IITs, haven’t seen any movies, read a book or courted a person of the opposite sex, your worldview is going to be limited," Deb said.
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For students who make the cut, an IIT education paves the way to a career as a scientist, engineer, entrepreneur, investment banker or chief executive. There’s even a swami, Saumyendra Nath Brahmachary, who was educated at IIT Kharagpur and heads the Dev Sangha, or Divine Association in India, which interprets ancient scriptures.
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Alumni span the globe. Ajit Jain heads the reinsurance unit of Berkshire Hathaway, the company headed by the billionaire investor Warren Buffett that is headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Arun Sarin is chief executive of the world’s biggest cellphone service company, Vodafone Group, based in England.
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Nandan Nilekani, head of Infosys Technologies, leads India’s second-largest software exporter. Nilekani attended IIT Bombay with Arjun Divecha, who manages $10 billion in emerging-market shares at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo in Berkeley, California.
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Another classmate, Narendra Karmarkar, a Bell Labs scientist, developed the computer-programming algorithm that bears his name.
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Bumping into a future executive is the norm on IIT campuses. Drawing from all of India, the IITs enrolled 3,707 students in July – just 47 more than the 3,660 that Harvard and Princeton universities admitted combined.
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"In America, if you’re smart, there are probably 30 really good colleges you can go to, and each takes 2,000 to 3,000 people," said Divecha, a 1979 aeronautical engineering graduate. "In India, if you’re smart, you don’t have a lot of options."
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Unlike an Ivy League education, which will cost today’s freshman at least $160,000 for tuition, room and board, IIT students pay 120,000 rupees, or $2,619, for four years. The Indian government picks up the remainder of the cost, 280,000 rupees.
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Syria and Singapore have asked India for help with starting IIT clones, according to the Indian Department of Education. Bhartendra Singh Baswan, secretary for education in the Ministry for Human Resource Development, said his agency is deciding whether to franchise the IIT system or allow the IITs to set up campuses abroad.
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"The IITs have developed a brand," Baswan said. "They are cautiously moving overseas."
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As the IITs expand, the threat of competition at home is growing. Since India joined the World Trade Organization in 1995, the likelihood that the nation will open its borders to foreign universities has increased, Baswan said.
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"That day has to come, and it may not be very far off," he said.
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Such a development might lead India’s top teachers to leave the IITs for better-paying jobs at foreign universities. An IIT assistant professor’s salary is about $5,756 a year, said Rajpal Sirohi, who runs IIT Delhi. That is about the same as for call-center executives in their early 20s with two years of experience.
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The median annual salary of an assistant professor at a U.S. university is $62,015, according to Salary.com, a Needham, Massachusetts, company that gathers pay information.
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Limited funds curtail research on IIT campuses, Sirohi said. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, operating revenue in the year that ended June 30, 2003, was $1.66 billion. In comparison, each IIT campus gets about 1 billion rupees a year in government support, or less than $22 million.
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That is about half of the cost to set up a lab for nanotechnology, the science of building devices from individual atoms and molecules, said P.P. Chakrabarti, a dean at IIT Kharagpur who leads company-sponsored research projects.
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For top students, the funding gap leaves little choice but to pursue advanced degrees in the United States. Sirohi said. "We need to do a lot better at the post-graduate level," he said.
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Since the institutes’ inception, graduates have often gained the benefit of a subsidized education and parlayed it into jobs overseas.
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That is changing. In 1991, then-Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao opened the Indian economy, easing import controls and allowing multinational companies to enter the country. The move brought opportunities in industries such as software and telecommunications.
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Today, about 15 percent of IIT graduates go abroad – mainly the top students in computer science, electronics and telecommunications engineering, said Shishir Dube, director of IIT Kharagpur. That is half of the 31 percent rate among students who attended IIT Bombay from 1973 to 1977, according to the New Delhi-based Institute of Applied Manpower Research.
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Even graduates who go overseas can help India by educating their employers on the wisdom of working with the country, said Vinod Khosla, who graduated from IIT Delhi and co-founded Sun Microsystems, based in Santa Clara, California.
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"In the 1970s, what was called brain drain was really brain training," said Khosla, now general partner of a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. "Much of that is now being used to create employment and opportunities in India."
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