IIT

I was just reading the article in rediff.com about this IIT brand and its there now in our blog. Of course one cannot deny that IITs are really worthy feathers in India’s cap. But the irony is that all the birds of the same feather flocks together not for the goodness of our community but rather the IIT brains are patented almost by someone who can afford to it. And Its my opinion that instead of having one IIT we could have had 1000 CEDs. It was rightly put by Murali Manohar Joshi that the huge amounts spent on IITs did not yield the expected ROI. Reason being the product we produced was not realized for our benefits. I often wonder why the kind of bullet trains that was there in Japan was not here in India. It is not the lack of ability for such a country like India, which was able to produce supersonic BrahMos Missiles, to implement the bullet trains. Rather, the bullet trains may not be a viable means for today’s Indian Mass. The same is the case with IITs. Its not that we were not able to afford to employ an IIT product but rather the IIT product itself was not a need for today’s (or probably the near past) Indian mass. Of course it was the power of knowledge that makes what you see as today’s India. But as you see these developments was not because of the knowledge produced by the IITs. Rather it was due to the rest of IITs, which has the lion’s share for this upsurge in our development. I have seen people doing research in big heads like IITs and IGIDR still researching the Great Depression of 1930s and getting a hefty monthly grant for what they do like a conventional report generation. On a personal note, I feel that, for such huge investments and grants on IITs and other such premier institutes, The ROI should have been even more and who knows…had IITs been with a private professional hand, the output would have been different.