The brand of IITs are so far fledged, that miles across the world, it is regarded as one of India’s most prestigious institutes. Keeping this in mind, the HRD Ministry has suggested launching new in addition to the ones launched this year. The NDA government allocated huge amounts of funds for development of IITs, although several people have retaliated against excessive government expenditure in such avenues. Smriti Irani, HRD minister suggests that newer IITs will lead to increased scientific research. The question here is that are IITs better institutes for research than those established for core R&D activities?

Prajakt Pande, Research Scholar at
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (constituent of Tata Institute for
Fundamental Research) says, “I look at IITs as teaching institutes, research is
a side activity conducted there. The covert agenda behind launching new IITs is
to extend the number of engineering seats than to conduct research.” There are
so many research centres in India like ISRO, and NASA, to name a few, collaborating
with researchers. Despite that, the government is keen on initiating prominent
research projects in newly launched IITs than in already established R&D
institutes. Many of the 8 IITs started in 2012 don’t even have a permanent
campus. IIT Jodhpur, IIT Patna, IIT Jammu and even the new IITs- Tirupati
and Palakkad are all functioning out of a transit campus and don’t posses enough
facilities to conduct high level research.

“When IITs are opened, equal
weightage is given to both research and teaching. New IITs cannot conduct same
volume of research as compared to old ones since they are usually hosted in
another institute’s campus. Besides, the IITs in small towns or Himalayas, like
IIT Mandi or IIT Jammu have different strategies of research because it’s
difficult to access resources like electricity, technology and even
infrastructure,” says Prof Suneet Tuli, Dean (R&D), IIT Delhi. If this is
the real issue, then what benefit does the huge investment in the new IITs, bring
to fundamental research in India?

Prof Pramod Maheshwari, MD, Career
Point Coaching Classes, Kota says, “Starting IITs for research is contradictory
to their current status. There is only one MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, then why
are there so many IITs? It’s diluting the brand.”

Besides, the amount of funds, both
internal and foreign, invested in research facilities in India is way less than
that invested in setting up new IITs. Although the volume of funding required
for research is much higher than the latter. According to Mr. Prajakt
Pande, “25% of government and foreign funding should be allocated to teaching
while 75% to research.” In various other countries, governments provide
millions in grants for research projects and provide world class facilities to
scholars to undertake trials. Yet Indian scholars lack that kind of support
from the government. According to Prof Suneet Tuli, “Institutes like BARC, TIFR,
etc. research in confined areas of science at an advanced level, whereas the
older IITs have a broader focus area and are involved in preliminary level
research.”

The argument still persists that is
it worth setting up IITs without basic infrastructure in areas that may take
decades to earn the capacity of older IITs simply under the agenda of research.
This is mainly because, IITs are still viewed primarily as teaching institutes
and there is no substance in trying to transform its identity into a research
hub.