Sci finance

8216;8216;Sure, this is useful money,8217;8217; says C.N.R. Rao, chairman of the prime minister8217;s Science Advisory Council and IISc8217;s director for a decade until 1994, 8216;8216;but this is not grand money.8217;8217;

8216;8216;It would be foolish to compare it with the great universities of the West,8217;8217; continues Rao, who is on the visiting faculty at the Department of Materials in the University of California, Santa Barbara. 8216;8216;The Institute is not at the level of Harvard of Berkeley; perhaps it is comparable to smaller universities such as Ohio State or Indiana State.8217;8217;

The finance minister8217;s approximately 23 million grant, even using the favourable purchasing power parity ratio, is less than 10 per cent of what a smaller university like Purdue has raised from its alumni in the past two years. If the Institute8217;s annual budget is Rs 160 crore 36 million, that of Stanford University is about 2 billion.

IN the quiet calm of the Institute8217;s luxuriantly green 440-acre campus, with an eye-catching central tower and dotted with nondescript laboratory buildings and Soviet-style housing, students and professors walk and cycle about, seemingly impervious to the debate on the finance minister8217;s largesse.

The Institute was established in 1909, after a committee headed by Jamsetji Tata proposed its setting up to 8216;8216;promote original investigations in all branches of learning and to utilise them for the benefit of India8217;8217;.

The royal Wodeyars of Mysore granted the land and the first batch of students was admitted in 1911. Illustrious alumni include the 1930 Nobel Prize winner C.V. Raman, nuclear physicist Homi J. Bhabha and space scientist Vikram Sarabhai.

Each year, the Institute receives 12,000 applications and preliminary admission tests are conducted in 20 centres countrywide. Three thousand shortlisted students are brought to the campus for interviews and only 500 are finally selected for admission into its 40 departments.

DESPITE this rigour, many experts believe the difference between the Institute and the best global schools is fundamental. First, the Institute does not offer undergraduate studies. The world8217;s biggest universities, such as Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, place extraordinary emphasis on their undergraduate programmes.

8216;8216;Great teaching and mentoring seem to go along with great research and, indeed, add to the research focus,8217;8217; says Vijay Chandru, who gave up his tenure at Purdue to return to the Institute as professor of computer science. 8216;8216;A top scientist like Prof Eric Lander, head of Whitehead and Broad Institutes, teaches freshman biology at MIT,8217;8217; says Chandru.

Moreover, big western universities run largescale systems at near-perfection levels. 8216;8216;In our country of one billion, we may find 300 professors who can be counted among the best in the world. But 3,000? No.8217;8217; says S. Sadagopan, director, Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore. 8216;8216;We have not mastered the game of scale in higher education,8217;8217; he adds.

For instance, MIT has produced over a million alumni in the past century, has 1,000 faculty members, of whom over 100 work in nanotechnology. 8216;8216;In our whole country, you might find a handful of those researching nanotechnology,8217;8217; Sadagopan says.

Even on measurable benchmarks such as the number of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty, patents generated or the number of international publications, the Institute does not figure among the world8217;s top 200 universities.

HOWEVER, it is not all a grim picture. In the past couple of years, India8217;s brand equity has risen enough to make the Institute top the list of those MNCs seeking research collaborations with academia, says S. Mohan, professor of instrumentation and chief executive of the Institute8217;s Innovation Centre. The Centre handles the transfer of innovative ideas from IISc faculty to industry.

Later this month, Boeing will sign an agreement with the Institute similar to the ones it has with Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the California Institute of Technology. Boeing will fund 0.5 million annually for five years for collaborative research in aerospace structures and materials.

For the past three years, General Motors has funded and designated the Institute as one of two centres 8212; the other is in China 8212; outside the US for research in material sciences and embedded systems. In the project8217;s second phase, which commenced recently, the auto firm will give 1.2 million.

Over 150 leading global and domestic companies collaborate with the Institute on research. This has brought in an average Rs 12 crore in annual revenue in the past three years.

STILL, the research-commercial tie-ups are in the early stages. Deeper relationships involving the sharing of intellectual property and entrepreneurship are just beginning.

But there are signs of change even in the century-old Institute. In mid-2000, IISc changed its policy to allow faculty to hold equity in start-up enterprises. As a result, Chandru and three of his partners from the Computer Science Department set up PicoPeta Computers to develop a low-cost handheld computing device called the Simputer. They also launched Strand Genomics, a bioinformatics company. Other professors are incubating three separate companies.

YET some things remain the same 8212; western universities still hold much of the allure for many young academics. One of the Institute8217;s star students is Tathagat Tulsi, a 17-year old doctoral researcher in quantum computation. Two years ago, Tulsi became the youngest student to enter a PhD programme.

Next month, however, Tulsi will leave for Bell Laboratories in the United States, to continue his research on computing in superposition state 8212; where problems that cannot be solved in hundreds of years by traditional computers can be solved in seconds.

Like Tulsi, many of his peers are attracted to universities abroad for their research infrastructure, cachet and the money on offer. Tulsi started at IISc with a monthly stipend of Rs 8,000. This increased by Rs 1,000 in the second year. At Bell Labs next month, Tulsi will earn 2,200.

8216;8216;Most of the Institute students want to do postdoctoral research abroad,8217;8217; admits Tulsi, who himself will head to Bell after his PhD, which he hopes to complete in six months.

WITHIN India, the Institute does not face serious competition. 8216;8216;That lulls us to become complacent,8217;8217; says Goverdhan Mehta, director, IISc. But like many other experts, Mehta fears the times ahead are challenging. As the economy booms and industry jobs become very attractive, salary and other differentials will drive talent away from academic pursuits.

India urgently needs not just to upgrade IISc but also create a few more institutions that are world class and aggressively pursue new areas of research. 8216;8216;If China can do it, why not us?8217;8217; asks Rao.

Former alumnus S. Ramadorai, CEO-MD of Tata Consultancy Services, the country8217;s largest software and services firm, feels the finance minister8217;s generous gesture could turn the tide. 8216;8216;The quantum of money is not important; the recognition that it is a world class institution will ensure that other forms of funding follow,8217;8217; says Ramadorai.In his optimism lie IISc8217;s hopes 8212; and India8217;s dreams.