When the IITs were established, in the 1950s, there were only five. Since 1994, eight more have been added, and three more are proposed. This is causing meagre resources to be stretched thin When we now see teachers out on the street striking, we know there is much that is wrong with the institutions. A few years ago, the faculty at the IIT in Delhi blocked some MNCs from the campus because they were paying summer interns far more than what the teachers earned

Nearly a decade ago, a loose group of mostly Indian Americans calling themselves `Friends of IIT', and led by Silicon Valley entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi, sought to raise an endowment to win for the nation's prestigious IITs `functional autonomy' from the government. Rekhi claimed he had the ear, and backing, of then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for such a plan. This, Rekhi and others believed, would be necessary for the Indian Institutes of Technology to sustain the quality of education and to keep pace with peers across the globe.
Nothing came of it, mainly because critics silenced the debate with the familiar, and highly effective, charge that `foreigners' were trying to `take over' the IITs, built assiduously over the years by the government. That still would have been all right if the critics had offered an alternative plan to safeguard the future of arguably India's most accomplished educational institutions. Instead, what they said was this: The IITs are doing just fine. Just leave them alone. After that, neither the Friends of IIT nor the government has looked back to see how well the IITs are doing.

In fact, some like Gururaj Deshpande (a hugely successful US-based entrepreneur and brother-in-law of Infosys chief N R Narayana Murthy), who had made a personal pledge of $100 million to the IIT in Chennai -- $5 million each year over the next 20 years -- have withdrawn because the institutes have been unable to come up with an acceptable plan to spend the money. To be fair, many other successful alumni have funded a variety of projects at individual IITs but there hasn't been a concerted effort to prop up the IIT system as a whole.

When we now see teachers out on the street striking, we know there is much that is wrong with the institutions. The faculty is over-burdened and underpaid. A few years ago, the faculty at the IIT in Delhi blocked some multinational software companies from the campus because they were paying summer interns far more than what the teachers earned. Infrastructure is not keeping pace with the times and new IITs are being proposed, and even opened, with barebones facilities.

Even in the past, we have recognised several shortcomings in terms of facilities and infrastructure. Still, these appeared surmountable, and indeed, over the years, have been surmounted by administrators, faculty and students. But now, they seem a lot more difficult because the number of IITs is being expanded at a frenetic pace.
When the IITs were established, starting in the 1950s, there were only five. Since 1994, eight more have been added, and three more are proposed. This is causing meagre resources -- mainly by way of government grants but also increasingly from donations by wealthy alumni, research projects and student fees -- to be stretched thin. The faculty is putting up with extraordinary workloads, and modern infrastructure requirements are barely met.
Surely something has to give. The question is: should it be quality?
It is precisely this scenario that the Friends of IITs anticipated in the late 1990s.
If the Vajpayee government had acted on their plan, things could have been very different. It is probably not too late for such a proposal to take wings. It might even be an opportune time, considering the number of technocrats in government, starting from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and including Sam Pitroda, who heads the National Knowledge Commission; Raghuram Rajan, an adviser to the PM on finance; and recently Nandan Nilekani, who heads the national ID project. Interestingly, two of the three are IIT alumni. Also, unlike 1999, when the BJP government was hard pressed to reconcile its economic policies with swadeshi, there is far less xenophobia that can strike dead any debate.

The IITs, despite becoming a soaring brand in the global corporate world, don't figure among the top global institutions in most rankings. This is mainly because of its research capabilities -- both in quantity and quality. Still, the IITs remain the best undergraduate technical institutions in the country and will remain so for a long time because it is near impossible to set up, or develop, new ones in good time. Consequently, they will continue to attract the best talent in the country. That is why it is important to keep them in good health.
One way to do so would be to dust off the Friends of IIT plan and review its feasibility, even if there is reluctance to hand over any control to `foreigners'.

Essentially, the Friends of IIT plan envisages the American model in which universities build a large corpus that is then used by an independent governing council to run the educational and research programmes. Harvard University, for example, has the largest endowment -- estimated at over $35 billion -- which it uses to fund its programmes. Several other universities make do with much less. On the face of it, such a model has a lot of merit.
It will ensure professional management, academic rigour, high quality of education and world-class facilities. That is not all. Many universities also meet modest goals of affirmative action and provide scholarships to the needy. What is more, the IITs will need considerably less than many leading US schools because of the vastly different cost structures, and the breadth of their current programmes.

There is no reason why such a model cannot be amended suitably to meet goals in the Indian context, among them quotas for backward castes and tribes, and aid for the poor students. Surely, there would be understandable concern, not to mention fierce debates, over who would hold how many seats on the governing council and how this management system would evolve over the years without compromising the quality of education or the broader social goals. But such a plan would have to consider an overarching question of whether or not the government still needs to control higher education. Surely, the time is past when the country needed the government to do so. If the government still needs to do something, it is in primary education.

Human resources development minister Kapil Sibal has not adequately addressed the IIT issue in his 100-day plan or eyed a long-term plan when negotiating with striking teachers. Somebody, somewhere ought to soon revive the Friends of IITs debate. Sam Pitroda looks a good candidate. As chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, he has the ear of the government, and he is a keynote speaker at a pan-IIT conference of independent IIT alumni groups in Chicago early next month bmkrishna@epmltd.com About the author: Bala Murali Krishna is associate editor, ENPL, The New Indian Express group