NEW DELHI -- It is called the biggest export house of the Indian sub-continent.
With Dr. Arun Netravali, former president of Bell Labs, Rajat Gupta of McKinse, Desh Deshpande of Sycamore Networks, Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins and Suhas Patil of Cirrus Logic the alumni lineup could not get much better.
Its students power innovation at the Silicon Valley, run the largest airlines and shape the tech indices at Nasdaq.
When an institution of that pedigree goes shopping for faculty, the deluge of applications is predictable. The expected happened when the Indian Institute of Technology at Delhi, one of the seven premier engineering colleges of its kind in India, advertised for vacancies in the chemical engineering department. In no time, 120 applications were on the desk of director RS Sirohi.
Sifting through the deluge, 18 were selected for a final interview. It proved to be a wild goose chase. Not one of those shortlisted was found to be good enough to teach at the prestigious institution.
"It has become very, very difficult to attract good faculty," Sirohi said. "When I look at faculty, I want some spark in them. That is missing."
Unable to fill the vacancy, several departments at IIT Delhi are facing a 40 percent shortage in faculty, the problem being most acute in computer science, chemical engineering and electrical engineering.
The student population has grown 45 percent in the last eight years to 4,350 while the number of teachers has not kept pace.
Against the 15 most-experienced faculty who retire every year, only 40 have joined in the last five years, diluting the teacher-student ratio. In the next seven years, when 115 of the 371 faculty retire, that will pinch even more.
IIT Delhi is not the only institution in India facing the problem.
IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Guwahati and IIT Roorkee are braving the same situation, with shortages in faculty between 20 and 35 percent. If the issue is not addressed immediately, the well-oiled engine that churns out over 3,000 world-class engineers annually could dry up.
The paucity of quality teachers is not a problem that occurred overnight. Money appears to be part of the problem, if not at the root of it.
The senior-most faculty gets a gross monthly salary of a modest $674, not very different from what a good student would take home immediately after graduation. Among the perks is a ceiling of $4,100 in three years to attend seminars. To supplement their income, they are allowed to work for consultancy projects 52 days a year. Of the revenue generated by those projects, 35 percent is handed over to the IITs.
"If you do not pay what they are worth why would they stay and work there?" says Arjun Malhotra, chairman of TechSpan, who graduated from the IIT in the late 1960s.
"IITs have been the jack of all trades, master of none. So a reorientation is a must," says Rajeev Agarwal, president of MAQ Software, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 1986.
A McKinsey study found that the typical IIT was granted 3-6 patents in 1996-97 against 64 for Stanford Engineering and 102 for MIT Engineering. Similarly, the number of citations per faculty between 1993-98 was 2-3 for the typical IIT, while it was 52 in the case of Stanford Engineering and 45 for MIT Engineering.
At this rate, the IIT juggernaut is going to some day roll to a halt. Clearly, corrective steps urgently need to be taken.
One among a slew of new measures is the decision to invite Dr. Bruce Montague, an expert in operating systems engineering, to teach at the IIT Kharagpur. The tab for the initiative was funded by donations from the alumni. Delhi and Bombay already are working on a plan for a similar exchange. TechSpan's Malhotra suggests that industry veterans could be enrolled as visiting professors.
A group of alumni of IIT Kharagpur joined Cisco in donating $25 million to wire up the entire campus, helping to lend credence as a world-class campus. A meeting of IIT Bombay alumni raised nearly $15 million in a single day to fund various initiatives. IBM, Cisco and other companies have set up labs within the IIT campuses for research and knowledge sharing, which helps generate much needed revenues.
