Ever since the minister of state for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh made a remark against the faculty in top institutions like the IITs and IIMs, it has a caused a sense of unrest and furore among the academia in the country. The top cadre of our pedagogical system did get riled up with Ramesh’s “ignorant” remark about how the
faculty is not world class, but the students are. This obviously didn’t go down too well with the faculty, and they were up in arms against the minister. The sore point of the entire situation was how the government hardly recognises the talent and keeps criticising despite of top class research going on.
Most of our IITs and IIMs are ranked in the top 100 institutions in the world, and some even qualify under top 50 in the world. Prof Anil Gupta of IIM Ahmedabad says that this sort of remark from the minister was completely uncalled for.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong in setting up good labs in co-operation with the private sector. But in the process, the attempt to denigrate the highly respected institutions was completely unavoidable. He obviously had not done his homework. He perhaps did not know that there are many professors in IITs and IIMs whose work is internationally recognised and respected and in some cases, is a global benchmark. Today, when the world is looking at India, we need to get rid of colonial mindset and ask ourselves what kind of research we need and what should government do to promote it,” says Prof Gupta.
For most of the institutions this comes as complete lack knowledge from Ramesh as there are a number of research projects and collaborative tie-ups with some of the best universities abroad like the IIT and the IIM. IIM-Bangalore is the first B-school from India and second from Asia to distribute case studies through Harvard Business Publishing portal. At IIM A, several new models of innovations have been developed. “Our grassroots work began in 1988 where we conducted research on farmers’ knowledge and innovations has become a global benchmark, apart from publication in MIT journal and several other top journals, this has led to setting up of National Innovation Foundation, only organisation,” says Prof Gupta.
IIT Madras is known for its pioneering civil engineering department which has collaborated with several engineering companies to design several complicated building structures.