HRD ministry approach miffs IIT dons

Three new IITs are opening next month, but no buildings, infrastructure or faculty befitting the global brand is in place yet. Chetan Chauhan tells more.

Updated on: May 20, 2008, 01:24:49 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

Prefer HTon Google

Share via

Copy link

Here’s another example of the clumsy manner in which the HRD ministry handles India’s most prestigious institutions of higher education. Three new IITs are opening next month, but no buildings, infrastructure or faculty befitting the global brand is in place yet.

Three existing IITs — Guwahati, Madras and Delhi — have been made ‘mentor institutions’ for the new institutes at Patna, Medak and Rajasthan.

Faculty from the Guwahati and Madras IITs will be deployed to teach at makeshift campuses at Patna and Medak. IIT Rajasthan doesn’t even have a ‘makeshift campus’, and will debut from its mentor’s campus at IIT Delhi.

Besides inconveniencing faculty assigned to the new IITs, the arrangement is bound to affect the quality of instruction. Taking into account the new OBC quota, the teacher student ratio will increase to 1:18 from the existing 1:12. Ideally, it should be no more than 1:9.

In April, Higher Education Secretary R.P. Aggarwal announced that IIT Rajasthan would have a makeshift campus at IIT Delhi. Ministry officials also said IIT-D had begun work on the campus.

But on Monday, authorities at IIT-D betrayed ignorance: “There is a lot of talk about it but I don’t know whether it would happen or not,” DN Jain, Deputy Director (Faculty) at IIT-D, said.

Academic circles feel the new IITs are being pushed as a political expedient with little focus on the quality that these institutions have come to represent.

Earlier this year, the HRD ministry had appointed IIT Guwahati as the mentor institution for the new IIT at Patna.
Similarly, Madras would have mentored Medak and the Delhi institute would host IIT Rajasthan in its own campus.

A professor at Delhi IIT disagreed with the concept of sharing the faculty saying it would impinge on the quality of instructions to students. He said the new academic session would start in a month’s time but the matter hasn’t yet been discussed at any length with the teaching staff.

The story at other campuses is not different. “If we have a problem, we will handle it. We have to implement the Government's orders on deployment of faculty at the Medak IIT from amongst our existing staff,” said Dr K Panchalan, Registrar, IIT-Madras.

From his comments, it was obvious that teachers in Madras weren’t very excited about the deployment plan.

However, IIT-Guwahati Director Gautam Barua claimed that there was enough staff to be spared for the new institute at Patna.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

Check India news real-time updates, latest news on Hindustan Times and more across India.