Attend workshop, get IIT brand
By Neha Singhvi

The best and brightest among Indian students went to study at IIT, many of whom would later lay the foundation of our booming IT-ITES outsourcing sectors. IIT graduates like ex Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, McKinsey Partner Rajat Gupta, Sun Founder and eminent VC Vinod Khosla are giants of international business.

The Government of India has launched a concerted drive to enlarge the IIT system.  Not surprisingly, many alumni feel this would dilute the elite IIT brand.

Professors across the elite Indian Institutes of Technology have been taken aback by a recent proposal of the human resource development ministry to ensure that the new IITs match up to the brand created by the older ones.

The ministry is planning to hold brand classes for the eight new IITs in the hope that they learn the culture, vision and quality associated with the original five IITs.

The ministry plans to conduct a workshop for directors and administrators of all the new IITs, top officials said.

The meet will also be attended by directors of the existing seven IITs — the original five in Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai, Kanpur and Delhi and those at Roorkee and Guwahati — as trainers.

The directors of eight new IITs — at Patna, Ropar, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Indore, Mandi, Rajasthan — will be students at the workshop.

“The ministry has never in the past had to confront a situation where the IIT brand was at stake. Today, we realise that while the new IITs are essential to meet the demand from students, poor grooming could leave the new institutes second-class IITs,” a senior ministry official said.

However, the IIT community has termed the workshop idea “absurd”.

“This is absurd. How can the IIT brand be taught to anyone? No one can be trained to be an IITan through a workshop,” a senior professor of IIT Delhi said on conditions of anonymity.

“If this were the case then many technical institutes could get an IIT equivalent brand just by attending workshops,” the professor said.

An IIT director also critised the move.

“The HRD Ministry is belatedly trying to assure the IIT community that standards will not fall. But it is too late. The training, conceptualizing and ideation should have happened before the new IITs were set up,” the director said.

Techgoss note:  You can enjoy more Geeky Karma comics at their official site.