IITs producing India’s techno leaders

What is common among the former CEO of financial powerhouse Citigroup, CEO of Europe’s biggest mobile phone group Vodafone, former managing director of Mckinsey and the promoter of India’s largest listed IT company that has top global corporations as its clients? They are all graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology — popularly known as IITs.
For over five decades, the IITs have quietly produced thousands of engineers, many of whom now occupy the top slots in the global technology and corporate world. It has indeed been a long journey for the IITs, the center of repute for aspiring engineers, since the first of them opened in 1951 in the small town of Kharagpur in West Bengal in a complex that was a prison during the British Raj.
Today the country boasts of seven IITs, which are among India’s growing centers of educational excellence, research and development in science, with six of them being ranked among the top 10 sciences and technology schools in the Asia-Pacific region. The Kharagpur center was followed by IITs in New Delhi, Chennai (formerly Madras), Kanpur, Mumbai, Guwahati, — one each in the various regions of the country. One more chapter was added in 2002 by converting a regional engineering college in Roorkee.
All of them offer undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. These institutions have received support from Britain, Germany, US and the former Soviet Union. Graduates of the institutes have come to play a prominent role in global business, not just in tech companies. Little wonder then Microsoft chief Bill Gates terms IITs as “unique institutions” that have made their impact worldwide.
“The computer industry has benefited greatly from the tradition of the IITs,” said Gates, in his keynote speech at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the IITs in California last year. Microsoft and many American companies have been drawing liberally from talent pool of the IITs and there are hundreds of IIT alumni in the US alone. Gates called the IITs and their alumni a “treasure of top rate intellectual resource” for the world.
He said if there was one feature of the IITs that he would never want changed was its philosophy of respecting merit above everything else. IIT is of the two institutions that Microsoft funds research. The other institution is Cambridge University in the campus of IIT Delhi. Similarly, IIT Kharagpur does research work in collaboration with multinationals like Motorola, Compaq and Oracle.
IIT Kharagpur has announced plans to set up a campus in Silicon Valley. In a country with an abysmal record of primary education and an inefficient and outdated higher education system, these IITs are centers of unmatched educational excellence. Vinod Khosla, an IIT graduate and cofounder of sun Microsystems in the US, teams IITs as toughest schools in the world to get into.
“Microsoft, Intel, Sun Microsystems — you name it, I can’t imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven’t played a leading role,” Khosla, who is one of Silicon Valley’s most important venture capitalists, told American television network CBS in its “60 Minutes” program recently.
“When I finished IIT Delhi and went to Carnegie Mellon for my master’s, I thought I was cruising all the way through Carnegie Mellon because it was so easy, relative to the education I had gotten at IIT Delhi,” says Khosla. The sparkling alumni roster also include N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies, India’s largest listed software company that writes software codes for top global corporate, Gururaj Deshpandae, the founder of Sycamore Networks, and Suhas Patil, the founder of Cirrus Logic, all US-based companies. Rono Dutta, former president of United Airlines, and Victor Menezes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup are also IIT graduates. Carnegie Mellon University in June named Pradeep Khosla, also an IIT graduate, as the new dean to lead its College of Engineering. Khosla, 47, is an internationally renowned Indian American researcher and educator, an expert on robotics and intelligent systems, embedded software and cyber security.
“IIT student have done exceedingly well, both in India and abroad. The label IIT encompasses a dedicated faculty, a good ambience, well selected disciplines and peer learning,” said R.S. Agarwal, deputy director of IIT-Delhi. IITs have always been getting the best students, the most brilliant and competitive with a strong will to succeed,” Agarwal said.
Hundreds of thousands of IIT graduates migrate to the US every year, many to work in the computer and software industries. According to the CBS television program, one begins to get idea of the status of these premier Indian engineering schools after putting together Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University.
IIT holds a proud spot in the country’s history. India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru set up the first IIT campus in 1951 to churn out engineers to build big public works and infrastructure projects.
The IIT were “to provide scientists and technologists of the highest caliber to help build the nation towards self-reliance in her technological needs,” Nehru said. The success of IIT graduates in the global marketplace, which has helped the institutes earn the title Millionaire University, inspires a host of school students to appear for the exam every year.
With a population of over a billion in India, competition to get into the IIT is ferocious. For a middle-class Indian, a diploma from IIT is a passage to affluence, in India or abroad. The parents start goading their children to prepare for the admission tests three to five years ahead of the time they become eligible for writing the exam.
Only the top students, however, manage to join the millionaires’ honor roll. The 200,000 applicants each year must first pass exam in chemistry, physics and mathematics before they sit for a second set of grueling analytical tests.
The 20,000 who make it to the second test stage compete for 3,000 entry spots. Those with highest score get first pick of their major course of study. “ It is like swimming against the tide. If you get there, there must be something in you,” said Y.P. Singh who has spent 41 years in IIT Kharagpur — five years as a student and 36 years as a faculty in the electrical engineering department.
“The admission test of IIT is so tough that after clearing the exam you know how to work hard and achieve what you want to achieve all through your life,” Singh added.
Agrees Y.P.S Suri, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur. “The intense selection process guarantees that those admitted to the institute are smart and hardworking. Then the boot-camp atmosphere toughens them for business battle.
“Most IITians don’t have a problem dealing with cutthroat global corporate competition after going through the grind in IIT,” said the 1975-batch mechanical engineering graduate who runs an e-commerce firm in New Delhi.
Many an IIT graduate continues higher studies either in IIT or other global prestigious institutes such as Stanford University to improve technical skills. “Our name has huge brand equity in educational institutions everywhere in the world,” says Singh of IIT Kharagpur. Those graduates who head straight to work have plenty of offers. In the US they can command starting salaries of $ 50,000. IBM, Intel, McKinsey, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems have all recruited from the IITs.
With a view to emerge as global centers of excellence, the IITs are now set to widen their horizons.