Central government has announced setting up of several new IITs in different states of India. Every state wants one and within states, politicians and citizens are clamoring to have it in their own constituencies, their own district. Gujarat wanted to have an extension campus of IIT-Powai; in Rajasthan, there is a fierce contest between Kota, Jaipur and Udaipur; in Bihar Darbhanga was trying to upstage Patna to have one.
I often wonder why! There is an IIT in Guwahati and one in Kharagpur. How has it helped those places? An IIT in your state does not create new educational opportunities for the local people, does not help local industries, does not create new jobs (except maybe a few clerical ones), does not do any research focussed on local needs. What good are they for the local area anyway?
On the other hand, each IIT sits on hundreds of acres of land which government will forcefully acquire from farmers; farmers who won’t be allowed to take a short-cut through the campus to their farms if they wanted to. I am sorry for my rhetorical tone here but this is an expression of discontent with our institutions of excellence who are so completely divorced from their local communities. I have not come across any high quality research from IIM-A on business in Gujarat or my own alma mater, IRMA, creating any useful knowledge for rural Gujarat and these are just two examples.
Medical colleges are of course exceptions. They have a hospital which serves the local people and their professors often have private practice which improves the medical care facility in town. So, I would give my right hand to have an AIMS in Bihar but not an inch of land to have an IIT unless it is paid for by the Central Government at market price.
I would much rather have an ordinary private engineering college (with half its seats reserved for meritorious domicile students at subsidized fees) than an IIT in Bihar. It will create more opportunities of technical education for students of my state at lower costs. What would an IIT offer?
I have heard, and this may be apocryphal, that IIT Kharagpur was to be originally set up in Sindri, Bihar (now in Jharkhand) but then Chief Minister of Bihar, Dr. Srikrishna Sinha, asked for reservation for Bihari students. This was not possible with IITs; so the IIT went to Kharagpur, W. Bengal while Bihar got a regional engineering college (REC) in Jamshedpur. Regional engineering colleges have a certain percentage of seats reserved for domicile students.
Many call Chief Minister Sinha parochial and narrow minded for this and still rue the loss. Even though i am not a big fan our first Chief minister, I think it was a smart and sensible step.
