IITs introduce off-beat electives in their core curriculum to provide experience, recreation, or alternative education to their students. Although most of the IITs have now accepted the relevance of such subjects, the mentality in some of the top institutes is surprisingly contradictory. IIT Delhi and IIT Bombay are two such institutes that do not allocate credits to elective courses, rather provide them as an extracurricular activity only. The reason being that being amongst the premier engineering institutes in India, their core focus should be on related subjects only.
According to Prof S.K. Gupta, Students Affairs Dean, IIT-D, “Students can pursue their hobbies through cultural clubs and fests, but making them mandatory is an unnecessary distraction for them. Whatever we have right now is sufficient.” Prof N. Rangaraj, Academic Affairs Dean, IIT-B says they have not received or entertained any proposal from student clubs regarding inclusion of music and arts courses in the curriculum.
One of the major apprehensions of the deans to starting off-beat electives, is the provision of resources. A good amount of funds have to be allocated towards acquiring the apparatus and professors for newer courses. Besides, the required number of hours to learn the course also have to be accommodated in the students’ schedule. While these factors may or may not be accessible by IITs, the deans are not very sure of how these courses will benefit the students in the long run.
While deans of both institutes have clearly declined any purpose or benefit of off-beat electives, Student General Secretary of BRCA (Board for Recreational and Curricular Activities) IIT-D, Avadh Singhal says, “We have activities like NSS, NCC, NSO, etc which are mandatory. We have to complete 100 hours in any one of them over the four years of the degree. But other than that any more compulsion in terms of extracurricular activities is redundant.”
On the other hand, Shubham Goyal, General Secretary of Academic Affairs, IIT-B says, “Many of our sister institutes have activities like pottery, star gazing, architecture, etc. We also have similar courses which are neither initiated nor mandatory. Hence, we would like to make a proposal to our dean regarding the same.” According to Prof S Tripathi, Deputy Director, IIT Bhubaneswar, “Resources and apparatus will not be a big issue if the administration itself is keen on bringing such a change. All these initiative our in the experimental stage and hopefully a few years down the line, it will motivate other institutes to follow our way of learning as well.
In the past, there have been incidents of IITians either dropping out of the institute or making a career in alternative fields. (Read article). However, according to career counsellor Rajan Bhosle, “the statistics of students leaving their degree to pursue hobbies is not very high. In fact, the academic work in IITs is time bound which leaves students with a one track mind. Students need to be provoked to come out of their shell. Extracurricular subjects are necessary because there is a particular age to pick up certain skills and students with less social or interactive lives usually have a low EQ.”
While all these facts may be true, the fact is that not all IITs start such courses for recreational purposes alone. For eg. IIT Bhubaneswar introduced Odissi dance form as an initiative to boost their local culture. The benefit of such moves will be visible only after these electives have been run successfully for a few years. Meanwhile, students in IIT-B and IIT-D will continue to rally for bringing in extra academic electives in their curriculum.