IN PRINT
Union Minister for Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal, Tuesday backed Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh’s statement by questioning whether India has any world-class institutions.
Ramesh had Monday said the IITs and IIMs, the country's top educational institutions, were surviving only because of their quality students but did not have world-class faculty.
"In the situation today, is even one of our institutions world-class? If there is, it must be in the top 100-150 institutions in the world. That is not evident," Sibal said, a day after Jairam Ramesh declared that the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) had quality students but not faculty.
Sibal also said that the environment minister must be talking about his own experience.
"Of course, Jairam is talking about himself because he is a world-class student and an IITian, so he himself has insider knowledge," Sibal told said.
Supporting the environment minister's view, alumni associations from IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur demanded higher salary and perks for IIT faculty to attract new minds in faculty and to sustain IIT brand globally.
"Opening of new IITs by government without recruiting new faculty has already burdened the existing faculty at IITs. Almost every citizen in the country is paying education cess to ensure that our gurus (IIT and other teachers) are paid well. Most of the IITs are already facing faculty shortage," IIT Kharagpur Alumni Association member Y.P.S. Suri said.
"The current pay scales of IIT faculty are so unattractive that a fresh graduate from IIT attracts more salary," he said.
IIT Delhi Alumni Association’s Programme Director V.K. Saluja agreed. "We appeal to the government to make faculty salary levels inspiring enough to attract new minds. Adding new IITs has made this problem more acute," he said in a statement.
Source: igovernment
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Anonymous Sun, 2011-05-29 13:01
I agree with such statements," I think that we in the academic community should take the criticism with more open mind. Why live with an illusion of being world class without actually attaining the high standards of MIT/Stanford/Berkeley/Harvard/ Oxford/CMU etc.?", to uplift these institutions and not to open too many degraded IITs and IIMs to dilute the purposes of IITs/IIMs/IISc, to degrade the quality systems of such institutions who are the national pride and must exist to make India shining in future S&T forums. System should be online debate and feedback based with the feedback of NRIs, top ranking Industries, educationist and peoples to make it transparent, no red tapism should touch such places and if such people exist in these places then they should be replaced from the administrative responsibility to academic side as a worker to bring right talents to lead the areas in research. There should be no lobby or mafia culture in education or R&D otherwise it would be a serious setback to the nation in the long run, we will be only a market and producing substandard manpower (only skilled labor) in the global market but not a leader in S&T forum. We must face the reality and constructive comments must be well taken. Only raising the pay or provide them huge funding will not make a world class academic or R&D institutions in the country, they will buy equipments and it would be dumped in future, it needs better working environment in an organization and dedicated research manpower, crazy scholars that could be only restored to make the system transparent, respect to knowledge and works, criticism based. Knowledge makes a person humble but not a bureaucrat. There should be no action against a person who are giving online feedbacks in an open forum for sick units to make it healthy. The exceptional scholars like, Tathagat Avatar Tulsi , "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tathagat_Avatar_Tulsi", should get open opportunity to cultivate new knowledge domain rather than conventional or propagated research, they lead some R&D tasks in the country but do not work as a simple Asst. Professor. Our many scholars left the nation due to brain drain and red tapism, some of them were mentally disturbed later on due to not getting proper work environment but they were exceptional, like Dr. Vashishtha Narayan Singh, "http://www.scribd.com/doc/22520195/Dr-Vashistha-Narayan-Singh-The-Great-Mathematicin-PhD-university-of-California" , Dr Hargobind Khorana and many more who are pride to the nation but we were unable to retain such brains in our nation and give them suitable R&D environment. We must break our bureaucrat culture in S&T in future to see the real performances of our workers, only respect the work and knowledge. Those who are supporting wrong, they should be caught under supporting corruption in academic institutions. System should be fully transparent. This is the country where a person having degree in physics, computer science or chemistry, can lead R&D in electronics engineering without proper knowledge in subject or core areas and they claim them as a country leader in that domain and people accept them, how the high level requirement of R&D in the country is fulfilled under these circumstances. R&D never advances on the basis of false, a real researcher must exercise truth in life.
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