IITians Do Some Soul-searching
Frederick Noronha
They are corporate honchos, technologists, engineers, editors, politicians,
major players in Silicon Valley...but in their core lies the good old IITian.
Half-a-century after the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) were launched,
their products came together at IIT-Bombay recently to look back at their
achievements and shortcomings.
They were built to create leaders, more than just engineers or technocrats,
said IITian Sandipan Deb, now editor of the Financial Express and author of the
book The IITians. Deb pointed out that IITians had succeeded in a broad number
of fields. From Wall Street to filmmaking, from the NGO sector to software
sector, while not moving away from what was thought as engineering being a way
of thinking, a way of life. Deb said his shift to journalism had drawn very
intense family opposition but added: The confidence that IIT education gives
you stands you in good stead.
The IITs are a set of premier technology institutes in India located at
Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Kanpur, Guwahati and Roorkee. Some IITs
were established with financial assistance and technical expertise from UNESCO,
Germany, the US and the former Soviet Union. The first came up at Kharagpur,
near Kolkata, in 1951.
During my time, the Indian government and public sector undertakings were
very attractive institutions to join. (The military-related) DRDO was just
taking shape. So were the steel plants. We were in the process of building
infrastructure and capabilities, commented M Natarajan, the scientific
adviser to the defence minister and an IITian. So, is it a twist of irony that
the products of socialist planning and post-independence dreams of
self-dependence in technology have now become the uber-capitalists of Silicon
Valley?
Forty per cent of Silicon Valley start-ups have an Indian founder. We are
moving the world ahead and then looking at contributing back to India, said
Webaroo.com founder Rakesh Mathur. Ashank Desai, the founder of software tiger
Mastek, which has been in the news for its innovative solutions even with the
traffic system in London, said: We were pretty much more naive in terms of
what job opportunities we would see for ourselves. I didnt even dream we would
start an IT company one day.
Tanmay Rajpurohit, founder-president of the Lok Paritrana political party,
said: I graduated in the 21st century (2001). When I entered, I thought of
R&D (as a solution). Then it made me think. Indias not lacking in human
resources. We are lacking in intellectual statesmanship even 50 years after
independence. Rajpurohit, however, added as an aside that his decision to
join politics after IIT had led him to be disowned.
IIT-Bombay director Ashok Mishra argued that the IIT brand was being built
even in the 1970s, when he was a student. In the early days, when you
graduated, you worried whether you would get a job or not. Now before you
graduate, you have two to three jobs in your pockets. You had scholarships to
go abroad...but with the economy booming now, it is different. Whether they are
in R&D, education, research or management or entrepreneurship, IITians excel. I
see IITians going into entrepreneurship more and more. R&D is now getting
converted into technology incubation. When you see peers who have started and
excelled, your confidence level goes up too, he said.
But beyond the gloss, there were concerns too. There is a shortage of 150,000
scientists in India, noted Mishra. Natarajan pointed to fields like space and
atomic energy where India has a lot of catching-up to do and also the need
for more IITian skills there.
Sandipan Deb noted that collectively, Indias IITs were producing just 4,500
top engineers each year, a miniscule figure for a country of one billion plus.
(IANS)
---------------------------------
Heres a new way to find what you're looking for - Yahoo! Answers _______________________________________________
assam mailing list
[email protected]
http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
