Our Translation Of Knowledge To Wealth Is Very Poor

Prof. V. Ramgopal Rao, Director of IIT Delhi, in a candid interview with Pritha Roy Choudhury pinpoints the problems that plague the IIT system…

- Pritha Roy Choudhury

Q. When we talk about global ranking, it looks strange that not a single institution from India finds a place in the top 100. Why is it so?

A. If I talk about IIT Delhi, if you take the QS ranking, the QS ranking has six parameters and out of the six parameters, on three we currently get zero. These are international faculty, we were never allowed to recruit international faculty. The second parameter in which we get a zero is the international students. At a place like IIT Delhi, we reject 299 students out of every 300 students who apply. The third parameter where we get a zero is the student-faculty ratio and that is because we are increasing the student intake in all IITs, the numbers are high and now with this EWS quota, 25 percent more. The ratio is below 1:15, which means if we cannot show one faculty member for every 15 students, we again get a zero. Among the remaining three parameters, one is perception. In the US people might have heard about IITs but they think that IITs are still undergraduate institutions, many people in Japan may not even know what IITs are and as a result perception about us is not very high at the international level, so we get 40 marks out of 100 in perception-based ranking. Next is the employer reputation, there again we get about 50 out of 100. The last parameter is the research impact on that we actually score 90 out of 100. We are losing out on these parameters because we are not international enough.

Q. What are the major challenges faced by IITs?