IITs: The Big Elephant in the Room

As the quintessentially average Indian, immediately after completion of my secondary level school studies, I signed a tacit covenant with my parents that I will devote my next two years to the pursuit of "cracking" IIT-JEE. Looking back, straining my memory to its hilt (I happen to have a better than average memory, perhaps my only redeeming quality!), I cannot recall a single discussion with my parents as to why should that be the course I must be pursuing, why not, say, a career in history studies (I had broached this topic, much later in my career, and was met with incredulous stare from my parents which obviated an explicit response - "Are you kidding me? History? Jokers with a career in history moonlight as masked tigers and bears in zoos to supplement their meagre income" - a claim which is sadly true in most parts of the world, but cannot be truer than it is in India), it was as if an unstated truism that "IIT" is where you need to be if you want to make it big. I did prepare fervently for the next two years, did spectacularly well in the maths paper, average in physics paper, and flunked the chemistry one, resulting in an unceremonious end to my "IIT aspirations", and had to settle for a much less glamorous undergraduation in Jadavpur University based on my West Bengal JEE result (far lesser "pedigree" than IIT-JEE, but still apparently top ten material in India).

The stench of this failure clung to me like a miasma for a long time. It affected my self esteem, my sense of self worth, not made any better by the fact that several IIT-JEE toppers (ranking say 263, or 427, or 700) were ones with whom I had attended coaching classes; that realization clawed at me much like the comicbook character alter-ego torments Michael Keaton in Iñárritu's Birdman - "you deluded fool, you actually thought you are at the same level as them?". It healed over time, around a decade, and since I am now completely cured of it, I find myself in a position to judge the entire charade dispassionately without my personal Birdman clawing at me with the story of sour grapes.

Yes, it is pervasively accepted in many circles of India today (one of the few things which make me hopeful that all is not lost) that IITs, along with IIMs and AIIMS - are abject failures. Transcendental failures. Pretty much the biggest failures of India. The founding fathers of modern India (Nehru et al.) conceived these institutes with ambitious goals of driving India towards global leadership in science, technology, management and medical science. None of which has materialized at even a minimum level. After nearly 75 years since inception, IITs have yielded zero Nobel, Fields Medal, Turing Prize, Abel Prize. Same goes for AIIMS and IIMs. Not one pathbreaking innovation which has changed the world. A simple Google search for things like "top 10 innovations from IITs" will yield embarrassing search results, while the same for Harvard or M.I.T will warrant dedicated websites to chronicle all discoveries and inventions they contributed to, such is the number and breadth of them. Mr. Narayan Murthy rightly said that all modern wonders of technology - from refrigerator to television, from robotics to laser, from GPS to Voyager, from iPhone to Facebook to Google to Twitter to MacBook to Pentium to Windows to Linux - all are western innovations, and that India (along with a majority of the world, a worthless collective, neatly packaged into a pejorative moniker - "third world") has made zero contribution. That includes the thousands and lakhs of IIT and AIIMS passout engineers in the last 75 years. Not a single medical breakthrough (like cervical cancer vaccine, or MRI) has been achieved by any of the 10-12 AIIMS till date. Not a single great management theory (like Porter's five 5f, or Six-Sigma, that impacts the entire world in corporate or management fields) has come out of IIMs. Much like IITs vis-a-vis JEE, IIMs are known just by the toughness of CAT, and AIIMs by that of NEET. The collective worth of a chain of supposedly premier institutes has been reduced to the performance in the entrance exam, and has virtually nothing to do with what they end up achieving. This leads to an entire sub-industry in Kota to prepare students for JEE, and even candidates with no pedigree are seen to be teaching there just after graduating, helping students "crack" the JEE, which is a reflection on the quality (not toughness) of JEE, if just a graduate can teach mathematics to aspiring candidates, teaching them "tips and tricks" to "crack" the exam, instead of developing in them a sense of wonder and love for the subject. This also highlights a problem of the IIT system - its high point is its "cracking" and nothing that comes later, creating an industry of education (and edtech) that thrives on this "cracking" culture (even Unacademy ads run the tagline - "let's crack it", instead of "let's learn how to design single crystal blades"). Perhaps the JEE should consider asking Olympiad level problems in its questions? Food for thought.

So, what exactly ails IITs? The answer is partly evident from LinkedIn and media - IITs make fanfare only during one part of the year - the placement season. LinkedIn posts made by the official IIT channels themselves, along with their quotes and retweets by gullible media, on how "Google has offered a plush 1.5 crore ₹ package" to that IIT Kanpur computer science graduate (all these packages are grossly inflated and utterly misrepresented, but not without connivance from every party involved - including the institute, company and the not-so-gullible students themselves), or how that IIT Delhi Computer Science topper is going to Princeton to pursue PhD, etc. These serve as a good indicator of what ails IITs, but, on closer thought, we will realize that these are not the diseases that plague IITs, these are the symptoms, the disease or rot lies much deeper - the entire education system, culminating in the biggest problem - the (un)holy grail of IITs - the JEE itself.

Let's take a close look at the education system of India. Students pursue their secondary education until the age of around 17 (X-th standard), then prepare intensely for JEE/NEET for the next two years in XI-XII standard (higher secondary education). During their secondary education, they are introduced to a host of subjects to develop an overall universal erudition - history of India in details and key events of the world - from Crusades to Renaissance to Industrial Revolution to WWII; life science (often called biology); geography - from the formation of monadnocks to rift valleys; elementary physics and chemistry, often lumped together as "physical science"; maths (including complicated theorems and corollaries in geometry, basics of algebra). People who think that the rot in IITs starts from XI-XII miss the crucial point - the rot starts in secondary level itself. Why should the students mug intricate details of Crusades in details? Or the internal anatomy of a human heart, necessitating painful hours of practicing drawing the heart in all its gory details - from auricle to ventricle to aorta? How many of them eventually will opt for a career in medical science? And how many of them will not completely relearn, in far deeper details, the entire anatomy of the human heart, thus rendering the hours of practice the student had put in in school nearly useless? Same goes for other disciplines - particularly history. The education system of India is divided into a labyrinth of boards - central boards (like CBSE, or ICSE), and state boards (like West Bengal board, Telangana board). I completed my secondary education in West Bengal board, where one oddity used to be the enormous detail in which we had to study history. We studied Mughal history in detail, the administration of Ashoka in detail, the minutiae of the systemic attacks of Alaric, Attila and Gaesaric on Rome, culminating in the precipitous fall of the latter in 476 AD, in excruciating detail. Why? What exactly did we achieve by doing that? We forget most of the details in the very next year itself, forget remembering them for a lifetime - one of my friends recently asked me "Who came earlier - Aurangzeb or Samudragupta?". And he was one of the better students in school. Same goes for maths as well, we used to solve immensely complicated problems in geometry based on theorems. What did that achieve? Sure, that makes for popular YouTube videos where the average American student is shown to be inept while the average Indian student seems to know numbers and geometry inside out, resulting in clickbaity video titles like "Why are Indians geniuses in maths?" that stoke our ego from western validation, but what next? Who keeps churning out Andrew Wiles and Terence Taos and Manjul Bhargavas? Who proves Fermat's Last Theorem, or Poincare Conjecture, or conceives something gorgeous like Support Vector Machine? If we are so good in maths then why do nearly all our Math Olympiad medal winners flock to the west to pursue higher studies, instead of the "inept" American students flocking to study maths in ISI or CMI? What happens in our secondary education is - we become serious Jack of all trades, master of none. Note the term - "serious Jack". We should indeed become Jacks in our secondary school level, but not a "serious Jack", rather, we should be a "curious Jack". More on this in some time.

So what's the problem with being a serious Jack? It is that we learn so many things which require substantial effort and time, blithely ignoring the fact that the student who is made to rote Attila's war strategy in detail may be has his curiosity piqued by the sublime smoothness of an aeroplane soaring in the sky. Or the student spending painful hours in perfecting the sketch of the human heart (like yours truly did) for a subsequent exam, is actually curious about how the cantilever suspension bridge withstands strong winds. Or the student who is learning the arcane details of congruence of two triangles gets excited by the battle strategies adapted by Caesar at Alesia, or Alexander at Gaugamela, or Napoleon at Austerlitz. They are all studying the same set of things, in gory detail, with the result that they rarely develop cognitive abilities in domains outside these realms, and their initial curiosities in certain subjects get drowned by the rigour and pressure the course load demands.

So what is the problem with that? The problem begins to manifest itself during college admissions. How many of us have noticed a strange phenomenon exclusive to Indian colleges - there is a "hierarchy" of departments or streams in all colleges? The toppers (in the context of a given university. After all, what constitutes a pleb in IIT Kanpur may constitute a topper in an NIT) opt for "electronics" or "computer science". The next eligible candidates, once those streams are filled to the brim, opt for electrical engineering. Then mechanical, chemical, production, metallurgy in order. Isn't that odd? One will be hard pressed to find a 15th ranked JEE topper opting for metallurgy in IIT Bombay. How come all toppers (supposedly the crème de la crème) love only electronics or computer science? Does it make sense, statistically? Is material science any less exciting or short of problems to solve? What about Gallium Nitride explorations to make superior radars? Or making single crystal blades? Or designing the stealth material for a 5th generation jet fighter? Or designing the surface of the next level of Aditya Solar Probe that plans on traversing closer to the Sun than even Parker Solar Probe did? What about mechanical engineering? The state of the art technology that powers a TBM (we spend millions of dollars every year importing them from China and Germany, adding to our logistical backlogs when supply chains hit snag)? Or a new sophisticated tunnelling method to carve tunnels in the Himalayas, instead of borrowing in 2023 the Austrian tunnelling method invented in 1950s? Or designing the Chenab Bridge in-house without needing German consultancy? Or making ballastless tracks for bullet trains without spending billions of $ to import them? The lists are endless. Each stream is filled with exciting research possibilities, practical applications and scope for innovation. Why then, do we see an ossified hierarchy where only the leftovers (lesser among the qualified candidates) opt for those streams in that order? Worse, IITs offer students possibilities to change departments in first of second year - it is almost always students from different streams flocking to computer science and electronics, a computer science student rarely discovers in second year that material science is what truly beckons him. Why so? That is because nobody really chooses streams based on interest or passion for a subject - students choose them purely on basis of job prospects. The Googles and Microsofts recruit from Electronics and Computer science streams with plum pay packages, metallurgy gets may be some job offers from Shaporji Pallonji at a placement package a fraction of what Google offers. The hierarchy of students selecting streams corresponds and correlates directly with the hierarchy of placement "packages" offered by companies. So, is the solution to be obtained by the Shaporji Pallonjis and Tata Chemicals offering equivalent packages? It will be definitely elicit an improvement, but it will still be far from ideal.

Why so? Because at the heart of the problem lies the root cause - the students don't love any subject or stream. They all overstudied for the last two years - solving intricate problems of recalcitrant monkeys climbing a bunch of pulleys as Irodov imagined them, or probability of a ball inside an urn being black given 27 other conditions of balls in other urns, or organic chain reaction between formaldehyde and its chiral form. All of them studied the exact same thing. All of them appeared in the same exam (JEE), solved the exact same problems, and all of them entered the XI-XII standard after studying the exact same things in secondary school. When their entire study history until college is uniform, how come we suddenly expect them to branch out overnight in college, choosing different streams? They don't, instead, they continue to do the same thing here like before - they all take the same decision uniformly - opt for the "best" or "most optimal" branch, to "maximize the benefits out of the soul crushing studies done in the last 2 years". That is why we see mechanical or chemical engineers so cavalierly start preparing for CAT immediately after entering college, or start preparing for data-science courses in second year, looking for a possible job in Google (I choose "Google" here as a definitive metonym for a range of elite computer tech companies - from Apple to Microsoft to Facebook to Amazon. All are great and desired in equal measure, but nobody made tech "sexy" like Google did, so it epitomizes this genre and may be considered THE metonym for big tech) post graduation. That is because none of them chose mechanical or chemical streams because they loved it, they opted for them because that is the "best" department their ranks in the entrance exam could afford in the "hierarchy" of streams, the "rank" of any stream being proportional to its placement prospect, and thus their natural instinct from day one is to understand that their current stream will not get them the maximal prospect, so they need to do those things to move to warmer climes.

So why don't the students love any subject? The answer is simple, they never get a chance to love any subject. They spend the entire XI-XII learning Irodov, Resnick-Halliday and TMH, and, to paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park, they get so busy to find out if they could, they forget to think whether they should. How can one love a subject? It can happen only when one has explored from a wide range of topics and subjects and dabbled enough with them to understand whether and which of them piques one's interest, and just about enough to not consider it a wastage of time should it not. If we discuss our previously discussed hypothetical student from secondary school who loves to see flights operating so smoothly, and wants to design something sophisticated like seat ejector (which we are totally dependent on Martin Baker today, often choking us on export permissions), would his love endure if he is made to study totally irrelevant subjects like organic chain reaction, Haber's process, radioactive decay of Xenon for 2 years? Or does it make more sense to understand that his love for seat ejector will eventually parlay into adjacent domains, like designing astronaut seats in a spacecraft, or wings of a jet fighter, or complicated machinery like the industrial vehicles JCB or Mitsubishi make, and accordingly induct him in a course with mechanics (yes, all those Irodov pulleys), basic physics and chemistry in relevant domains, and sophisticated maths and calculus to enable him to be in a position to do so? Another guy is interested in organic chain reactions, believing that therein lies the root to finding a cure for cancer, but he is also made to study for two years solving Lorentz Force and pulley problems from Irodov. Why? What is achieved by doing that - making a budding chemical scientist study friction coefficient and Lorentz Force? He has no inclination or perhaps aptitude for physics, and thus he will probably be filtered out by JEE, or worse, the rigour of JEE will drain him of his love for chemistry and reduce him to the standard herd looking for a Google placement in Mountain View. This actually happened to Venkat Ramakrishnan - he loved chemistry, he failed the JEE, but, thankfully, stuck to his love for the subject, eventually winning a Nobel - Nobel laureate Venkat Ramakrishnan failed IIT, medical entrance tests. Imagine a future chemistry Nobel Laureate being weeded out of a chain of universities and eventually the country itself simply because he was unable to solve Physics problems from Irodov or probability problems from TMH in JEE (for the uninitiated, TMH means Tata-McGraw Hill, a publishing house which publishes a series of books with complicated problems and solutions in Physics, Chemistry and Maths for JEE)! He loved chemistry and his love endured, most people either don't love anything at all (as evidenced by interviews of IIT JEE toppers after results of JEE are declared where they say "I will now decide what the best stream for me would be" - and almost, always, opting for electronics or computer science in IIT Bombay, Kanpur or Delhi), or their threadbare love for a subject is worn out in the rigour of the preparation for JEE over two years.

The fact that students don't love anything other than the prospect of a plush package manifests itself in many forms - majority of IITians are starkly unidimensional, rarely excelling in any field unrelated to their studies. Sure, they dabble with some guitar here and some standup comedy there, but they remain idle pursuits and not remotely of a serious inclination. In contrast, universities like Stanford and Harvard groom students who, beside excelling in studies, are world champions in a range of domains, including sports. Sample this - in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, just the Stanford affiliated participants alone won 20 medals in total. Yes. 20 medals. Just Stanford affiliated students. In 2020 alone. Forget all IITs (who, between 10-12 of them combined, have yielded zero medals in all Olympics since 1950 combined), the entire 1.4 billion population of India have till date hardly won a total of 20 medals in all Olympics combined since 1896. The asymmetry boggles the mind. Why is this difference so stark? Because pursuing excellence in a variety of fields is possible in only those people who are extremely motivated and driven, when the only goal is to get a 1 crore ₹ job offer or a green card to settle in USA, it rarely translates to meaningfully serious pursuits, and excelling in Olympics is a serious pursuit of the tallest order.

Which brings us back to why the problem won't be solved if Shaporji Pallonji offers a pay package at par with what Google offers. Because mechanical, or electrical, or chemical engineering - these are hazardous fields. One has to stand in scorching sun for a day inspecting a sophisticated cantilever bridge being constructed as he is the lead engineer. Or spend the day covered in soot and charcoal while sampling a good chemical combination to fuel a jet fighter. Or be covered in debris and dust while chiselling the rocks from a tunnel in Himalayas. All of these fields involve a fair amount of hazardous work, physical labour. Compared to it, electronics and computer science are "easier" fields, necessitating work mostly in air-conditioned rooms in futuristic looking Art Deco office campuses surrounded by largesse of free food and massage rooms (thanks Google and Microsoft) while being clad in bermudas. They do involve hazardous work when work is related to hardware, like chip fabrication in lab, or storage design - but even those supposedly hazardous work happens in air conditioned labs in controlled environments, not subject to rigours of nature like the other fields spawn. Thus, people who do not seriously love the subject will automatically gravitate towards those fields where the pay is equivalent and the work environment is much less taxing (that is why we have stupid edtech companies like Vedantu founded by chemical engineer passouts from IITs. They were not driven enough to start a startup in their fields of study). Sure, Shaporji Pallonji can double the pay (which, as we suggested earlier, they already raised considerably in our discussion, to bring it at par with Google), but that is not scalable. Only when one loves mechanical engineering passionately will he be oblivious to the patina of dust accumulating on his lapels from dawn to dusk as he monitors the sculpting of a new tunnel in Himalayas. The one who does not love it passionately will study and dabble, but eventually, in the 4th year, will "discover" that data-science is what truly draws him. This is evident from the multitude of mechanical, chemical, electrical graduates working as software engineers in big tech, or teaching those subjects in universities (but rarely can we see computer science graduates working in Caterpillar or Shaporji Pallonji as mechanical engineer). Only when one loves mechanical engineering will one pursue higher studies, research and problem-solving in that field - increasing the prospects of discovering great things, instead of gravitating towards a plush pay package by some company. Only when one loves a subject will he dare take a risk and start a company based on an idea in that field, instead of joining Google to help them develop Google News (Krishna Bharat) or Google Chrome (Sundar Pichai). Loving a subject deeply, passionately and pursuing that subject is sacrosanct if we want to have great discoveries and research in the entire spectrum of science. Our principal problem occur due to a disconnect between what we should or do love, and what we end up doing. When one takes computer science because it pays a lot, we get Sundar Pichais and Satya Nadellas. When one takes computer science because he loves it, we get Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. We need much more of the latter, the first category will anyway be always replenished by a steady stream of candidates.

So, how can we make the students find out what they love and then make them fall in love with it? We understand that they don't love anything primarily because they are not informed enough to be in a position to love anything. The solution starts by totally altering the secondary education course, it should be made into a dabbling exercise instead of a serious, taxing one; where we need not rote Ashoka's administration in details but understand just the salient points. Not mug up the entire military career of Napoleon, but key battles only, like Austerlitz, with a cursory glance at other battles, and resorting to audio-visual medium to impress the details in much better detail and in much less time than merely writing them with chalk on blackboard - like this: Napoleon's Masterpiece: Austerlitz 1805 - YouTube. Similarly, the study of human body should be done at surface level, just enough so that the student is well versed in the basics of human anatomy, not like Sherlock who did not know the Solar System, but not so deep that it takes hours of time to perfect a sketch of the heart. Multiplied across all subjects, this will relieve a lot of load and time for the students. What can be done in this freed up time? Dabble more, in a lot of subjects. Introduce them to the details of aerospace engineering - breaking them further into key domains - like mechanics of flight: seat ejector, wing design, rotor design, turbine blade design; chemistry of flights: composition of stealth material, composition of fuel or radar material. Introduce them to the details of electrical engineering - design of high voltage absorbers, circuitry of power lines, complexity of a refrigeration system required to keep the insides of a plane normal for passengers in flight, etc. None of this should be put to test, let the students dabble, find out what they like, what they don't. At the end of X-th standard, they will have dabbled in a large variety of sciences and streams to various degrees, and these three of four years of dabbling will be enough for them to find their love and what excites them. This is the first part of the solution - exploring. Only when one has explored enough can he decide and find what he loves and what he doesn't. Sure, earlier, the X-th passout would know how to draw a human heart. Now he won't. And why exactly will that be a problem? If his field of interest is history, he will never need to draw a human heart (anyway he will forget what he drew in a matter of years), and if his interest is medicine, he will eventually enrol in medical college where he will be understanding the anatomy of heart in far more detail. Either way - the sketching of human heart in secondary level plays a negligible role in his overall career besides sucking up copious time and preventing him from exploring other things. Being a "curious Jack" has the same impact as being a "serious Jack" in the course of career in this regard, but the former allows one to dabble enough to find what excites him the most - a prerequisite of doing great things in any field.

Now that the student has found out what he loves, what next? Here comes the second part of the solution - JEE. At the heart of all problems that ail IITs lies JEE. As we discussed earlier, it makes everybody study the same subjects with the same level of expertise, under the assumption that all engineering fields need a combination of expertise in Physics, Chemistry and Maths. That is a fundamentally flawed assumption. Vapnik knew nothing about Lorentz Force or Xenon, yet he conjured something - Support Vector Machine, than all those IITians who can solve Irodov problems at the wink of an eye. Isn't the world better off with Vapnik not spending years trying to solve Irodov problems? Instead of a catchall solution to test and filter all candidates, it should test them based on their fields of preference. So, now, the student, who has decided after X-th standard that he loves machine learning, will not be tested on Physics, Chemistry and Maths. Instead he will be tested on Linear Algebra, Combinatorics, Statistics - the three fundamental tools of machine learning. The student, instead of solving Irodov problems and Morrison-Boyd during XI-XII, will now spend it mastering statistics inside out, going deep inside linear algebra by watching the entire M.I.T Courseware lecture series of Gilbert Strang, and solve immensely complicated problems in combinatorics the likes of which perhaps get asked only at Olympiads. If he clears the JEE, he is now totally equipped to study Machine Learning and all the intricate details of SVMs and Transformers. If he is instead interested in powering jets and rockets through fuels, the JEE should test him in inorganic chemistry, fluid dynamics, just enough maths to tackle the mathematical aspects of designing the optimal fuel. If he clears JEE, he is now well equipped to learn the details of designing fuel for India's AMCA jets, simultaneously experimenting in labs and learning theory in classes in chemical engineering course over the next four years. If another student discovers he loves jet fighters, but just the mechanical aspects of it - he should be tested by JEE on mechanics (all the wrath of Irodov and much more), maths (including sophisticated calculus and geometry, but no need to study probability). If one has found out that he loves chip design, he should be tested in organic chemistry, material science related physics, requisite amount of maths. Cutting the clutter - removing topics and subjects irrelevant to the field of study one plans to pursue is a double bonus - he gets to invest the time saved in becoming a better expert in the remaining subjects which are relevant (earlier, differential equation is what one would learn in 1st year of college, but now, not needing to spend time mugging up IUPAC names, one can become expert in differential equation in XII itself, making him a better expert in calculus than before, and now spending the first year in college in actually doing something with it rather than learning it), and the hazard of learning topics not of interest in great detail is gone, resulting in more alacrity of mind being devoted to the subjects of interest.

By changing the secondary, JEE and university education, we essentially turn the model into one of explore and delegate. Let the students explore until they find out what they love, and delegate studying in detail of that subject until it is required. That way, he learns enough of every subject to be a well-functioning all-round individual, but it also buys him ample time to explore and find his calling.

Also - a direct consequence of this pattern of JEE - the entire "ranking" shebang is gone! Ranking works only when the entire test is uniform and same for all students. When one set of students is preparing for aerospace engineering, while the other for molecular physics, the concept of ranking no longer applies. This is much needed for the overhaul, no student should be considered lesser or greater in a university, they should be in the campus because they do and study what they love, not because they managed to "get" computer science there due to a superior rank. This will go a long way to destigmatize the "core" engineering fields and excite the curiosity of students in all fields of engineering, not just the "top" ones. A student should study metallurgy because he/she loves it, not because his/her JEE rank is "lesser" than others who chose the "posh" streams and filled them to their intake capacity.

However, while JEE is the core of the problem, but not the only problem. The IITs are a problem as well. The entire system needs a rehaul -

• First, it must develop robust university-military collaboration and industry-university collaboration. For that, industry must routinely pump money, lots of it, into sponsored projects and even long duration fields of research. For example, Daikin today makes sophisticated air-conditioners. We don't, our Godrej or Voltas ACs cannot match Daikin in comparison, with the result that Daikin ACs are exported all over the world, ours are second choice in India itself, forget being exported. So if Godrej has to make absolutely top notch ACs, it must invest a fair amount of money in the electrical, chemical and may be mechanical departments of IITs. Now, the students, who are there only because they love those subjects and fields, will get to work on it, which they would happily do, because they love their stream (contrary to what happens today - most of them opt for data science course, or internship in Google, or prepare for CAT - because they don't love their streams)! This would eventually result in superior quality of ACs being constructed by Godrej based on their research output, raising exports, more than recovering the money they invested. Same goes for others - today India is plagued by inability to manufacture jetfighter engines. Jetfighter engines are the most complicated machinery ever designed - more so than even atom bombs or spaceships. If LnT and HAL invest millions of dollars in IITs in relevant departments and streams, students who have already flocked there because they love the relevant fields will love that work on something as challenging as this. Eventually this will lead to innovation - a panoply of generously (that's the keyword - generously) funded MOUs between universities and industry, not just for research, but also for industrial job placement (with generous compensation, so that the mechanical engineer is not even tempted to join Google) engaging students who are there because they specifically love it and not because their rank was 487 and 486 is where mechanical engineering counselling ended for this year.
• Second - Add to it some peripheral (but extremely important) changes required - universities should be places which inspire the creativity. For millennia, architecture has made humans marvel, cogitate and reflect to come up with great things. In India, urban planning is a mess, and that will take a lot of time to fix. But universities are secluded and limited places, and overhaul there will take much less effort. The buildings in IITs should reflect splendid architecture - mixing elements from all parts of India (Cholas, Chalukyas, Hoysalas, Kakatiyas, Rajputs) and even the rest of the world (Baroque, Art Deco, Brutalist). Majority of buildings in IITs look soul-less eyesore potpourri of concrete, cement and glass - neither inspiring nor interesting. Compared to that, a cursory stroll in Oxford or Cambridge will fill the heart to its brim, the architecture is amazing, as are the aesthetics of the overall campus design. We must understand, when students opt for higher studies in western universities, this does play a subliminal role, a look at their brochures or YouTube videos fills them with a sense of wonder and desire to study there, which the IITs fail to do. We need to address this, and here too, the industry has to play a role along with government, lavish funding (one-time) to redesign buildings and campuses in resplendent architecture will go a long way to retaining top calibre students, so that the next Sanjeev Arora does not have to look at M.I.T for inspiration and awe, the gorgeous IIT Kanpur campus is inspiring enough.
• Third - its laboratories and research facilities need to be absolutely top class. Sure, the IITs have better labs and research facilities than other Indian universities, but they come a serious cropper when compared with their peers in Harvard or Stanford or Oxford, and that is a big reason why big talent settles abroad for higher studies and rarely comes back. We can ill-afford it. But yes, the labs and research facilities will need lot of money to stay at the top, and here too, the government and industry must play a role. The government, if necessary, must bite the bullet and raise the education/research budget every year to keep sustaining this, as well as industry do the same. Both will eventually benefit in the long run, if LnT spends few hundred million dollars to beef up the aerospace lab in IIT Madras, it will eventually be earning billions of dollars every year if that lab ends up delivering key research output to LnT for the latter to build a 120 kN dry thrust fighter engine to power a 5.5 generation AMCA. But, for that, it must take a bet, it must believe. As should the government.
• Fourth - government must make the education in IITs dirt cheap. If the fees are astronomical, as they are now, then a large number of students will have to opt for plush placements to pay the loans rather than pursuing their true interests. We cannot afford that - a student opting for a role in Google as software engineer to pay off college loans as compared to going for higher studies in IISC to pursue research in edge computing is a loss we can ill afford. We should create an atmosphere for students to pursue what they love - not pursue out of compulsion. Greatness always ends up being the sacrificial lamb at the altar of compulsion.

The last and perhaps most important part of the solution - the government and we, the people. Yes, the cliché stands that it must increase the budget allocation to university for research and development, and lower college fees. But spare them a thought - where will they get the money from? American companies - Lockheed Martin, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, Cisco, AMD, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics make products that rule the world - bringing in trillions of dollars of revenue and proportional taxes, which the government can and does use. Where will India get that much money? 2016-2022 saw a massive investment boom in India in tech sector, and what did India produce out of that investment? BYJUS? Vedantu? Unacademy? When the quality of innovation in India is this, even after massive funding, how can we build products that dominate the global market? So, yes, onus is on us as well to innovate, and not squander opportunities on a BYJUS. If we innovate, we fetch more money, and that sets a chain of events which the government can utilize. Until then, government can and should rely on the industry giants - the Ambanis, Adanis, Tatas, Birlas, Goenkas, Godrej - to fund universities in research and rehaul. Yes, it is risky and murky, particularly for a country not yet used to this, but this is a risk we have to take. We are too big a country to remain inconsequential and backward.