Engineering change

When the stars of the world of technology converge on Silicon Valley for the 50th birthday bash of the Indian Institute of Technology IIT,...

When the stars of the world of technology converge on Silicon Valley for the 50th birthday bash of the Indian Institute of Technology IIT, Kharagpur, touted as the launch-pad for Brand IIT globally, the children of India8217;s prized cradles of tech must remember to make it more than just a networking fund-raiser to wow Bill Gates. Born in a prison, IIT Kharagpur, along with the Delhi, Mumbai, Kanpur, Chennai, Guwahati and Roorkee institutes, is rated on a par with leading-edge engineering colleges around the world. Outside of India, the IITian is hot property. Not surprising this, considering that only the best brains get in 8212; many with the sole purpose of getting out of the country, as some would be tempted to point out. The vision that gave birth to the IITs 8212; to turn India into a technology superpower 8212; remains largely unfulfilled. Consider this: the entire technology, including the carriages for the Delhi metro railway system, has been imported from South Korea. And if India is recognised as a source for software code-writers, better known as programmers, the IITs didn8217;t have much to do with that although many of their alumni do call the shots in top global IT and telecommunications companies.

It8217;s not hard to figure out why the Indian technology engine continues to splutter and wheeze mid-way half a century after it was cranked up on the road to superpowerdom. The IITs have been providing cheap but world-class engineering education to thousands of bright middle-class kids with stars and stripes in their eyes. Most of them have overseas jobs or acceptance letters from US universities for post-graduate courses even before they graduate. Not surprisingly, India has over the past five decades exported possibly the best minds honed at great expense and subsidy to the US, without getting much more than homilies about its world-class institutions in return. In a protected economy that confused profit with profiteering, there was little scope for an industry-academia partnership. Corporate-driven research was almost unheard of, with the result that the findings of the lab rarely made it to the market. Of course, there wasn8217;t much of a market either.

The past decade of reforms, for all the bumbling, has created an atmosphere conducive to change. Research is increasingly being funded by the private sector, although corporate spending in this area remains a piffling fraction of that in the developed world. Researchers are coming out of dark corners to be profiled on glossy covers of business magazines. And, there seems to be a trickle of IITs8217; prodigal sons and daughters heading back home to help kickstart the new knowledge economy. The anniversary gala could be leveraged by the institutes to tie up with cutting-edge technology institutes like Stanford and MIT for web-enabled virtual platforms for joint research. Apart from hawking cost-effective research to global megacorps, they could drive home the message that India8217;s knowledge economy is ready to roll. And invite Bill Gates to the next anniversary party at Kharagpur, instead of the Silicon Valley.