An IIT veteran believes one of the best ways for India's premier technology institutes to go global is to attract foreign students and faculty, a move that would open the minds to learn from each other.
Abhay K Bhushan says it's not easy for IITs to set up campuses abroad.
Instead, he feels they can go international with their ability to get foreign students and faculty, similar to sometop institutes based in Singapore and China, among others.
"This opens up the minds of the people. That's one way to go global and international.We have to learn from each other", Bhushan told PTI on the sidelines of an innovation convention organised by IIT Kanpur as part of golden jubilee celebrations of its alma mater here.
Bhushan knows better. He has a "unique distinction" in the sense his roll number was one of the first batch of IIT Kanpur in 1960, when he was two months short of being 16-years-old.
He obtained his B. Tech degree in Electrical Engineering in 1965, and both his Masters in EE and Masters in Management degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
{{/usCountry}}He obtained his B. Tech degree in Electrical Engineering in 1965, and both his Masters in EE and Masters in Management degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
{{/usCountry}}The mentor of a host of start-up ventures in USA, he was a major contributor to development of Internet TCP/IParchitecture and was the author of FTP and the early versions of email protocols. He is co-holder of a dozen US patents on semiconductor drying and cleaning technologies.
He was co-founder of YieldUP International, which went public on NASDAQ in 1995, and of Portola Communications, which was acquired by Netscape in 1997.
Bhushan praised IITK for its stress on "learning by doing and not by reading and memorising".
He strongly argued in favour of the proposal on setting up eight new IITs, saying the impact of tehnology has gone up by orders of magnitude, since the 1960s when there was no television, mobile and internet, among others.