This is serious business. Indian technical schools are facing a huge faculty crunch. And it’s not just the third-rate polytechnics that I am talking about. India’s biggest global brand, the IITs are starved of qualified teaching staff. If certain estimates are to be believed, some 380 critical vacancies at the seven IITs across the country have no takers. Officials in the human resources development ministry, tasked to nurture higher education in the country, say the shortages are acute at the IITs in Kharagpur and Guwahati. That’s because they are located in the back of beyond and lack the support infrastructure to pull quality teachers.
Yet, nobody is ringing the alarm bell, yet. Why?
Because we Indians expect our mai-baap sarkar to not only pay for our education but decide how much of what we need to learn from whom and why. It’s the chalta-hai attitude with the citizens. And its chalta-hai attitude with the government. I’ll talk about that in due course. First, let me tell you why despite India’s so- called technological prowess, we lack sufficient technical teachers. It’s because we invest in engineering graduates, but not in quality research. So, qualified academic professionals are missing. Here’s a pointer: for almost 3.5 lakh students who make it to engineering schools every year, barely 350 go on to earn a PhD in engineering and technology. By next year, India will need 38,957 PhDs to man academic positions, but only 12,772 would have earned their doctorates.
That brings us to our second reason why there are so few doctorates in engineering, but so many technically qualified engineers. Because it pays to earn a degree and get started with a job than to spend years in academic excellence and get paid nothing. This is why the best of our IITians go abroad or to the IIMs for management studies, and the second best end up as code writers in the Bangalore body shops service global IT clients and the third rate among them take the UPSC exams.
Through the 90s, and more recently so, if you go through the list of IAS toppers in any given year, nearly half would be IIT grads. They start with four years in the field doing dirty jobs for their political masters and spend the rest of their lives pushing files and awaiting time-scale promotions. What a waste of national resources.
But then, education at IITs is a huge waste of the taxpayer’s money as well. If unofficial estimates are to be taken into account, the best guys at high schools pay anywhere between Rs 50,000 and a lakh for private tuitions to qualify for the IITs -- just check out any number of coaching schools and tutorial homes for what they charge -- then get the government to foot the bill for the next four years, before migrating to the West for higher studies, or to the Bangalore body shops, or the boondocks as babus, depending on their value judgement. Only a handful stick their necks out for research and take to teaching. It takes a lakh of rupees to teach each student at IIT every year; taxpayers bear up to 80 per cent of that cost. Last year alone, the government spent upwards of Rs 650 crore to keep the seven IITs running. And there was little in it for the teachers. In short, the IITs ate up taxpayers’ incomes to subsidise India’s high school toppers to find decent employment. Which is not what they were set up for in the first instance. The IITs were originally set up to produce quality technical manpower “to enable the future generation of engineers to become competent innovators, designers and product manufacturers”. Instead, the IITs today are fiefdoms of vested interests.
How do you change all this? How do you attract the best talents to the IITs to impart quality education to the country’s brightest students to make them innovators, designers, and product manufacturers of tomorrow?
No doubt, you do that by getting the best faculty that money can buy. Doing this isn’t easy. But it’s possible. One way out would be to make teaching a profitable vocation. MIT, on which the IITs are modelled, allows its faculty members to file their own patents and set up their own commercial ventures. In India, this is allowed, but subject to several ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’. Yet, unless you free the entrepreneurial spirit in our researchers, very few will step into research. Fewer still will take to teaching as a viable occupation. To make this happen, it’s best to commercialise the IITs. So, you free them from government support and control. You also get the students who pay lakhs on tuitions for getting into the IITs, to pay commercial rates for quality education as well.
I know the politicians will cry murder at this. Not long ago, they did so with the IIMs as well. But to get the system working and push the IITs into the study of frontier technology what better way than to make the students pay? And help the teachers earn.
Think about it.
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