Lack of funds for research hitting IITs, says Sibal

Updated on: Saturday, May 28, 2011

The group of ministers on media briefing, consisting of home minister P Chidambaram, I&B minister Ambika Soni, health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, minority and corporate affairs minister Salman Khursheed and others, decided to set the record straight on the IIT/ IIM faculty issue after many directors of the prestigious institutes had protested to HRD minister Kapil Sibal about environment minister Jairam Ramesh’s remark.

Sibal said the comment of the environment minister should be seen in the light of the general opinion within the country that the quality of faculty in IITs does not match the world standards. “But in case of IITs, the situation might not be the same,” he said.

According to Sibal, if factors like availability of foreign faculty, foreign students and medical courses are excluded, IIT-Bombay will rank 20 in the global index, followed by IIT-Delhi at 24, IIT-Kanpur (37) and IIT Madras (39). “If you talk of IITs as engineering institutes, they are right there,” he said, adding that 24.7% of teachers in IITs were former IITians. “Surely, they are world class,” he said. He, however, admitted that “In reality, IITs have not gained critical mass to change global scientific discourse.” He added, “But this has nothing to do with the quality of faculty. It is related to the ecosystem. In India, $8 billion is spent on research while the US spends $250 billion. The kind of research grants available abroad is absent in India. Also, there is lack of infrastructure and capital investment. The faculty cannot be blamed for this.”

Sibal said the genesis of IITs was to produce as many BTech graduates as possible, not research scholars. But in the last 10 years, there had been change in mindset with a growing emphasis on research. Sibal cited the instance of Manindar Agarwal of IIT-Kanpur who, for the first time in more than 2, 000 years, had evolved a method to determine prime numbers that was error free. He said top newspapers in the US and scientific journals had reported it prominently.

Lack of funds for research hitting IITs, says Sibal

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