Randomly opening new IITs without much thought to infrastructure has led to a dip in quality. Fewer numbers always mean better quality. It takes no rocket science to arrive at that.
The good thing about not knowing Shakespeare, Shelley et al is the liberty you can take with the language, and without much scruple. Take, for instance, the proverb ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’. What I mean here is, multiply the number of cooks and your quality gradually starts declining.
Those cooks don’t necessarily have to be in the same kitchen, throwing their ideas at what’s cooking in that same pot, and then come out with a khichdi that tastes pathetic. They can jolly well be in different kitchens, throwing their ideas and masalas with equal panache in different pots and pans, and then stir-fry and whip up a dish that’s unfit even for malnutrition patients.
To paraphrase Clinton campaign strategist James Carville’s most famous quote: It’s the numbers, stupid.
Once upon a time, when I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s (okay, the initial bit of it!), I knew of only five IITs in India: at Bombay (Mumbai was still a far cry), Madras (Chennai was equally not sharing space in the horizon), Kanpur, Delhi, and Kharagpur.
So, the quality of products (okay, brains) “churned out” (as many writers are putting it in Howzzit in this IIT quality debate that I find very interesting) by the IITs used to be good. In fact, they were of world-class standard simply because there were fewer of these institutions, fewer teachers and fewer students lining up for enrollment. Like most things in life, a check on sheer numbers ensured quality: you could get the best of teachers, and pick and choose from the best of aspiring students.
Then the government had brighter ideas, and went ahead to open IITs in places such as Guwahati and Roorkee. And the Pandora’s Box was open, well and truly. So next you had many other tech institutes in places such as Mandi, Hyderabad, Indore, Gandhinagar etc. getting tags of IIT.
Logic says you obviously end up with below-par quality on such a hurried expansion drive. After all, it’s not as easy to overnight increase the number and quality of teachers and students. In an article in Hindu Business Line long before Chetan Bhagat decided to open his mouth, and promptly put his foot inside it, IIT-Madras faculty member R Krishna Kumar wrote that the website www.topuniversities.com in its world rankings for Engineering and Technology included the original IITs in its top-100 list. “All five older IITs make it to the Top 100 — IIT-B (47 {+t} {+h} rank), IIT-D (52), IIT-K (63), IIT-M (68), and IIT-KGP (90). India is close to Germany’s six ranks and is on a par with Japan and China,” he wrote. (Read: In defence of the IITs: An insider’s view)
Tell me when any of the new IITs would enter that list, or any other such list that’s held with respect (and not by the likes of Arindam Chowdhury), and I will write another article praising Bhagat.
Till then, I would go with simple logic, which says had there been a cap on the number of IITs, quality could have been ensured. It does not take a rocket scientist to arrive at that conclusion, right?
I am sure Narayana Murthy spoke along the same lines, but trusting the habit of our television reporters and anchors, the poor man’s lines got blurred somewhere along the way.
So, am I saying we should stop opening more top-notch institutes? Heck, no. What I am saying is, do not expect the same quality unless the infrastructure is in place, which, mind you, takes time. And do not treat every door with similar address tags as the same holy cow. Be they the IITs, off-campus colleges, franchises of schools such as DPS, Modern School et al, the art colleges, or any other institution.
Heart within heart, we know they cannot produce the same quality as the ‘original’ institutions. But they are such revered institutions that it’s tough to acknowledge that fact.
So yes, the quality is down; and no, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in admitting that. That’s part of Murthy’s argument that prompted Chetan Bhagat to take potshots with his garbled use of metaphors at “Body Shop Inc”, isn’t it?
Now, I have not attended any coaching class to take the Joint Entrance Examinations (heck, I have never studied under a private tutor in my whole life, forget about attending a coaching class/institution), and neither did I ever want to become an engineer (don’t get me wrong; I know they are the mechanics behind every other thing — material or otherwise — we consumers buy in our daily, consumerist life in consumerist society, and much more). So, I am not certain what those coaching classes teach and preach, and whether they end up diluting the standards, as Narayana Murthy purportedly said.
But coaching classes sure do eat into a student’s faculty to use her/his imagination and brain in the quest for knowledge, thanks to their preference for learning by rote and limiting education to question-answer sessions. As fellow Howzziter Sowgandhika Krishnan wrote IIT Quality Debate: Saying Federer’s Form Dipping Doesn’t Mean he is a Bad Player, we need to delve deeper than just the IITs and make this a bigger debate about our overall education.
While I do not necessarily agree with Sowgandhika’s point, just as an example, that the grasp of English language that our parents’ generation was better because they were taught Shakespeare and other classical writers (if you ask me, Shakespeare is redundant and irrelevant in the language we speak and write in!; but that’s irrelevant here), I agree to the T when she says we need to ask ourselves whether our curriculum has been dumbed down.
We also need to ask whether doing away with Board examinations, as Kapil Sibal’s brilliant brainwave has ensured to a large extent, is the right way to ram education down the throats of our students. I believe taking away the tension and competitive spirit of the Board exams, which pit you against a much wider set of students of your age and calibre, will only lead to further dependence on coaching classes and learning by rote later, when these students attempt to crack exams for higher education — not necessarily the IITs but even institutions of social science, management, classical education, art and humanities.
And let us start tapping those faculties in a young mind right from the senior school level, before coaching classes belt out mass-produced specimens like Chetan Bhagat, with little idea of who they are and what they want.
