I think that in order for India to reach it’s full technological potential, India needs to change the IIT system. The picture below is from the US News & World Report and in the picture on the left is the best IIT in India i.e. IIT Bombay and on the right is University of Texas at Arlington which is where I got my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. As you can see the two schools are comparable for Electrical & Electronics.
Based on the comparison above, you can realize one important fact namely, the success of IIT students abroad is NOT because of the education they received at the IIT but rather because of the students themselves i.e. each year the IIT entrance selects the top few thousand students from all across India so no matter what education they get, they will still be good. The real question is how do you increase this number of good students tenfold or even hundredfold to make India great again (MIGA) ?
India needs to do the following:
Include SAT scores in the IIT admission process:
Do you know that until recently, most top Universities in the USA gave SAT scores a lot of weight in the admission process? India needs to base IIT admission on a combination of SAT scores and JEE score and this will really increase the number of qualified students by a factor of ten or more, because SAT scores test for aptitude not knowledge and so even the students who did not work hard for the JEE but have the aptitude for engineering study can get a chance to study engineering if they do well on the SAT. If this works in the USA, why can’t it work in India ? I took the SATs at the time and did extremely well but there was little financial aid for undergraduates in the USA at the time and years later the GRE helped me get financial aid in the USA for graduate study, so I can say for certain that if the IIT were to include SAT in the admission process it would have helped students like me.
Allow the IITs to have affiliated private colleges:
Right now all the IITs are fully operated by the government, so even though the government says there are 23 IITs the number 23 is just limited by the money the government has to spend, so why not bring private investment into the picture ? If the government allows private colleges to be affiliated to the IIT system, then you can easily have a hundred colleges which are affiliated to the IIT and which charge a higher tuition and make a profit, and since the exams are run by the IIT, the private college students will also be just as good.
Setup a Central Board of Baccalaureate Education i.e. CBBE:
There are so many universities in India and they all have different standards, but why ? All these students are going to work for the same companies anyway or go abroad to study in the same universities. I worked briefly as an Electrical Engineering Professor at Sharda University outside New Delhi and it seems like all the universities in India are duplicating effort i.e. they are all constantly reinventing the same damn wheel in setting up their curriculum.
Why not have a Central Board of Baccalaureate Education i.e. CBBE which can be simply a governing body which will set curriculum, provide free textbook material (in PDF format) and administer examinations for all the new colleges in India ? So that way the business community in India can easily setup for-profit colleges all across India without bothering about trying to bribe officials in the local Universities in their state in order to get affiliation. If you take the politics out of setting up colleges, then there will a lot more private colleges all across India.
People should remember that this model has been shown to work very well in India, just look at the CBSE, there are CBSE schools all across India and anyone will tell you that CBSE schools are the best schools in India and I am confident the same model will work for undergraduate education as well !
And Finally, spread the wealth:
Anyone who did research in engineering will tell you that apart from good faculty, the real differentiator between a mediocre school and a superlative school is lab equipment and computing resources. Computers get old and so does lab equipment so this is an ongoing effort. Here in the USA the government distributes the grant money at least to some extent on need based criteria, in other words the universities which already received large grants in turn get smaller grants and vice versa, and the purpose of this is to raise the standard of the smaller institutions. Even here in the USA the National Science Foundation is corrupt and full of politics but if India can avoid the politics and use some of the money traditionally going to the IITs and invest that money in smaller educational institutions then the research capability of India as a whole will improve.
In fact I have personal reason to dislike IIT. My second sister married an IIT graduate in San Diego, CA who had won the President’s award for excellence and this bridegroom’s father Chilukuri was a retired Professor at IIT Madras. My father was overjoyed that such a good bridegroom would marry my sister that he agreed to the request of this Chilukuri professor that the bride be given a good amount of gold, among other things. My father borrowed a lot of money, which took many years to repay, and made this happen. He did not give the dowry because he could afford it, I do not recall that my other sisters got anything like that, but because he was afraid of losing such a good bridegroom. And because of this, it was tough on all of us. I was in college in India at that time and for three years I only ate two meals a day because that is all I could afford and I had to go to my cousin’s house occasionally to bum a meal because I had nothing to eat, and even coming to the USA was tough, I just borrowed $2,500 for basic expenses which I returned in just three months and all this time this brother in law and my sister were sitting on all this gold in San Diego. It disgusts me that this Chilukuri IIT Professor would ask for such a dowry and that my father had to give it. I say all this because of this IIT brother-in-law’s snotty attitude that he is better, no, if you take a dowry, you are not better than anyone! That tells me that IIT breeds greedy graduates who are anxious to get as much they can and this is what happens when India treats IIT students as special.