New IITs: What are they doing differently?

That nimbleness got reflected during the recent Covid-19 lockdown, and steps IIT Gandhinagar took immediately after that.

While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is the byword for tech education and research, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), a younger institute, at times punches above its weight and manages to perform better than MIT. The reason, according to Prof Sarit K Das, the director of IIT Ropar, is that while MIT aims to excel in every discipline, Caltech focuses on select areas. “Newer IITs must follow the Caltech model,” he says.
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are public technical and research universities. The first five that were set up—Kharagpur (1951), Bombay (1958), Madras (1959), Kanpur (1959) and Delhi (1961)—are informally called older IITs. In 2008-09, eight more were established (Ropar, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Patna, Indore and Mandi), called second-generation IITs. In between, in 1994, IIT Guwahati was set up and in 2001 Roorkee University was converted into an IIT.*

It is these second-generation IITs that, like Caltech, are now punching above their weight. In both international (Times Higher Education, QS) and national rankings (NIRF), they are gaining positions, primarily due to their focus on research and teaching innovation.

IIT Hyderabad

Director Prof BS Murty says that being a young institute with young faculty (average age is 37), “we can think out-of-the-box, which probably some established and older institutes may not be able to.” IIT Hyderabad, he adds, has been able to do many unique things; for example, fractal academics, which is a first for any institution in India. In this system, instead of, say, a three-credit course that runs for the whole semester, courses are divided into modules so that a mechanical engineering student can take computer science or physics classes as well.

It also was the first to start a BTech in Artificial Intelligence; globally, top institutions such as Stanford and MIT offer such a course. “Our AI department has 25 faculty members,” Prof Murty says. Similarly, its BTech in Engineering Science is unique—students can decide after two years which branch of engineering they want to graduate in.
“We have started one full semester of internship for BTech students, a mechanism that isn’t there in any other IIT,” he adds. Other unique courses it offers are MTech programmes in additive manufacturing, in medical device innovation, in smart mobility, in cybersecurity and so on.

IIT Hyderabad was recently ranked in the top-10 in India by QS. Another area where IIT Hyderabad stands out is in the ratio of undergraduate and postgraduate students. “IITs are synonymous with BTech, but we have more PG students than UG—we have about 900 PhD students and 600 in MTech, whereas BTech students are close to 1,200. This year about 100 PhD students are going to get a degree,” Prof Murty says.

Global rankings give a lot of emphasis to ‘perception’; in QS, for example, 45% goes to perception. Prof Murty says that publishing good research and letting the world know that good work is happening at your institute is the only way to score high on perception. “If you do good work, your perception will get changed for the better,” he adds.

IIT Gandhinagar

Director Prof Sudhir Jain says that IIT Gandhinagar isn’t in competition with older IITs; the institute, instead, is redefining IITs. Prof Jain, who has taught at IIT Kanpur for 25 years, says that while older IITs may have a rigid decision-making process, newer IITs are nimble. “A younger person has a more flexible body; he or she can do many things an older person cannot, at the same time learning from that older person. The same is the case with older and newer IITs. We are a white sheet, you can write anything; you don’t need to first erase old text and then write something new,” he says.

That nimbleness got reflected during the recent Covid-19 lockdown, and steps IIT Gandhinagar took immediately after that. When the lockdown started, many institutions asked their students and staff to go home. “At IIT Gandhinagar, we told our students it’s your home. So we won’t force you to go anywhere. We also told them that in case they want to stay, they must live like family. We stored about two months’ ration in the mess,” Prof Jain says.

About 450 students stayed back, of the total 1,600. Immediately, a Crisis Management Group was created, comprising of three faculty and two staff members, and a control room in the hostel run entirely by students was set up. “They ran 24/7 control room for several weeks,” Prof Jain adds. “Running the campus during the lockdown was a community effort, not an administration effort.” And it included everyone in the community.

For example, when the lockdown started there were about 900 construction workers staying in six colonies. “We created a Shramik Kalyan Samiti and collected about Rs 6 lakh with a fund-raising drive to help them. We also created a committee called Padosi Gram Sahyog Samiti to help and support nearby villages; we identified their needs and supported them with essentials as well as moral support,” Prof Jain says.

All of this, he adds, wouldn’t have even been remotely possible if decision-making at IIT Gandhinagar was rigid.
Shifting to online classes, similarly, was smooth. “We advanced the summer vacation, and during that time we selected eight faculty members and asked them to experiment with online teaching. We also utilised the time to buy the hardware and software we would need for online classes,” he says.

IIT Gandhinagar started online classes on June 8 and these are running well because the institute had done a lot of dry run. “What helped is that our faculty is young, so they were able to seamlessly shift to online.” So that nobody is left behind, the institute identified 21 students from a financially poor background and give them Rs 40,000 each to buy a laptop.

Even as IIT Gandhinagar is gaining position in a number of rankings, Prof Jain says that’s not the focus area. “In the game of cricket, a batsman or a bowler plays after judging the pitch and not the scoreboard. Similar is the case with rankings; the focus has to be on students and faculty, and not on what rank I got in which rankings,” he says.

IIT Mandi

Former Director Timothy A Gonsalves says that over the last 10 years IIT Mandi has been able to not only attract good faculty, but also retain it. “Building infrastructure for a well-functioning institute in a river valley itself was a challenge, but we have been able to create that, and at the same time have retained the green environment of the Himalayan region,” Prof Gonsalves adds.

IIT Mandi, over the years, has been able to craft new types of BTech curricula, which, in addition to academics, also emphasises on teamwork and working for society. “We made it our mission to work for the society and developing solutions for Himachal and the Himalayan region. In fact, we have a body called the EWOK (Enabling Women of Kamand valley)—the main campus of IIT Mandi is in Kamand valley—that has helped village women start businesses of their own and also helped improve their education,” he says. “Our students regularly go out to nearby villages and spend time with them to learn about their problems and help develop solutions for them.”

IIT Ropar

Director Prof Sarit K Das says research is a major area for the institute. “In research, IIT Ropar was the top IIT in the country, even ahead of older IITs, in the recent Times Higher Education ranking,” he says. “In the 300 to 350 ranks, the two Indian institutes were IIT Ropar and IISc Bangalore, all others were beyond 350. This means we must have been doing something good.”

The Times Higher Education ranking also ranked IIT Ropar 47th in Asia, and 62nd among all the young universities in the world (less than 50 years old). However, merely producing research papers isn’t enough. “Citation of our research is where we stand out,” he says. “We decided right from the beginning that we will not count the number of publications in which we publish research papers, but will focus on quality. We told our faculty that if you publish in a very good journal, you will get plus-one credit, but if you publish in a third-grade or predatory journal, you will get minus credit.” This strategy created a culture at IIT Ropar that now everyone wants to publish in a top journal.

To get the best faculty and researchers, Prof Das conducted interviews in top universities and research institutes of the world and in India, and invited them to join IIT Ropar. “I got the best faculty and even gave them Rs 1 crore to set up a lab, and then I started demanding that you need to do world-class research,” he says. In the last five years 120 faculty members have joined IIT Ropar, and just six have left.

“In some older IITs, such things may not be possible, as they are very rigid—everything is cast in stone. I spent 20 years at IIT Madras so I know the problems there.” The second-generation IITs, all eight of them, are galloping, Prof Das says, and “I am sure within the next five years some of these will replace some of the older IITs.”