Wednesday, August 5, 2009

No flame, please

I found the BBC News article titled 'India's Faltering Education System' dated 18th Aug., 2006 quite interesting. The more interesting is the debate in the comment section. It can be found in http://212.58.226.17/2/hi/south_asia/4793311.stm

The observations of few are given below. It is time to introspect.

I am an Italian American executive recruiter, working for technology companies in the west part of the United States. As a part of my job, I have met quite a good number of Indian software professionals from IITs. Most of them are quite successful, established and holding c-level positions in big/blue-chip companies. However, none of these people has ever made any contribution to his/her IIT institute endowment. Surprisingly, some of these people actually made contributions to their graduate schools, such as Caltech, Stanford or CMU. On the other hand, I have seen Chinese people making significant contributions to their institutes in the mainland. I have seen same trends here in the US too. For most of Ivys, these endowments are the major source of funds to attract right talents. Sometimes I wonder - do these people really hate their Indian institutes or ashamed of being Indian? Again, I am not an Indian and this is just my personal opinion. So, no flame please.
Bob Copliano, US

If Government institutions cannot attract good researchers, then private research institutions should start doing this. Why are there are not good private universities in India? Lets not forget that schools like Cornell, MIT, Stanford are private schools.
Sathyan Subbiah, USA/India

There is a curious straitjacket in the Indian education system- that good students study engineering and medicine and mediocre students study commerce. Therefore, the cream of the students is forced to study mechanical subjects with little emphasis on original research. Few have the patience to study classical sciences, since all are after quick money. The poorest of the students are forced to study humanities and social sciences, and it is fruitless to expect them to come up with cutting-edge research. No wonder most of the top Indian academics, including Kaushik Basu, are based overseas.
Aruni Mukherjee, India

I am a final year student at IIT Kharagpur . The reasons about the declining number of students who are pursuing research after under graduation can be attributed to the following factors: 1) A job in India for IITians could easily fetch a starting salary of 400,000 rupees plus . However , If one opts to work as a research assistant , or go for PhD , then the stipend one gets is very less . It's like 10,000 rupees per month , whereas if a student goes to US to pursue higher education(read MS/PhD) , he gets $1800 in hand (after taxes) per month . 2) Dearth of quality professors in India . I think the reason for this is the low salary for the professors . At 25,000 rupees ($600) per month , one cant lead a life anywhere near to the kind of lifestyle a highly qualified and brilliant person would like to have . These people would better go abroad and join the US universities , where they get a much better deal. 3) Lack of proper infrastructure: Despite the fact that IITs have produced some great minds , the fact remains that it has to do with the tough entrance procedure . The faculty and infrastructure inside is quite modest by any international standards . There's shortage of water , lavatories stink , mess food is a mess altogether and surroundings are not much hygienic . Why would one like to stay if in every regard the option of doing MS from USA seems a more viable and better option?
Pushkar Prasad, India

1 comment:

Goutam Saha said...

I think the following article published in The Telegraph today quite relevant.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1090806/jsp/nation/story_11326768.jsp

Pay hike protest, the IIT way
OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

New Delhi, Aug. 5: Veteran IIT Kharagpur cryogenics professor Kanchan Chowdhury will report to laboratories and classes as usual tomorrow — but wearing a black badge of protest on his shirt pocket.

Demanding — as he puts it — respect.

Around 3,000 faculty members across the Indian Institutes of Technology are expected to wear black badges at work tomorrow in a rare public display of frustration at repeated delays in promised salary hikes.

A government panel under the former Indian Institute of Science director, Goverdhan Mehta, recommended a raise for the faculty at apex technical institutions like the IITs and the IIMs in early February.

But six months later, the government is yet to approve any hike in teacher pay at these institutes.

“It isn’t about the money. I chose teaching at the IITs even though my classmates and juniors are earning much more in the corporate sector. This is about the respect we deserve,” said Chowdhury, who has taught at IIT Kharagpur for a quarter of a century.

India’s premier engineering schools have faced an increasing shortage in faculty for over five years now, with better-paying industry luring away some of the best brains in the country.

But the sharpest jump in workload for those who teach at the institutes came last year, when the Centre decided to open eight new IITs and enforced an expansion in student intake to introduce OBC quotas.

Suddenly, teachers at the seven older IITs were expected to take more classes, tutorials and laboratory sessions, and even travel to sites hosting temporary campuses of the new IITs.

“The nation needs to decide whether by overburdening us without any recognition, it wants the IITs to become like any other higher educational institution. Or, do we want to retain the excellence associated with the IITs,” asked Chowdhury.

But even in their protest tomorrow, the IIT faculty will show what makes them different from teachers at several other Indian universities.

On August 1, the All India IIT Faculty Federation — the conglomeration of bodies representing teachers at each IIT — met at IIT Delhi and decided on the protest against the delay in their pay hike.

Minutes of that meeting show that apart from wearing black badges, the federation resolved “to take recourse to other expressions of protest such as mass casual leave”.

But three IIT directors, who requested not to be named, independently confirmed that their faculty had collectively decided to take all their classes, tutorials and laboratory sessions and register a casual leave as protest.

“Effectively, teachers will take all their classes, do all their academic work... and in protest demand that one of their holidays be struck off. That, I guess is the IIT way,” one of the directors said.