Narayanmurthy in PAN IIT 2011 : Only 20% IITians are among the top!

Thank you Anil for those kind words. Well, you should always discount what you hear from friends. Anil and I were contemporaries at Kono. Me as a graduate student and he as a promising undergraduate in mechanical engineering. He passed out in 69. So did I. Well, it is indeed a great privilege, great pleasure to come here after two wonderful speeches by my friend Nathan Nurya and Dr. John Ston, the president of NYU. Both Nitan and John looked at the higher educational institution from a global perspective, in some way from the perspective of the US. I am going to look at IITs from the perspective of India. I am going to look at IITs from the challenges that they have from the perspective of India. While it is true that by and large, in the initial years at least till probably 1995 or so, majority of the students from IIT tended to come to this country or the UK and Australia and made a wonderful name for themselves and for their country, that scenario has changed as was pointed out by Nathan with the wonderful data. Even before I do that, first of all, let me say this as somebody who comes from the other side of the pond. We in India are extremely proud of the non-resident Indians. Wherever I go, on average in a year I visit about 40 to 45 countries, almost everywhere I meet people of Indian origin, and without exception I must say that they have conducted themselves in a way that has enhanced the prestige of the country that has brought tremendous respect for the country. They are also people, again without exception, who are willing to add whatever value they can to the country, almost without exception. Therefore, I think all of us on the other side of the pond in India, we are very grateful to every one of you for what you people have done. I often tell my colleagues that performance leads to recognition, recognition leads to respect, and respect leads to power. Therefore, if India has to be seen as a powerful country, there's only one instrument and that is performance. And in that, I think you people without exception have performed extremely well in your own spheres, whether it's universities, corporations, doesn't matter wherever it is. Almost without exception, you people have done an extraordinary job.

[Applause]

Therefore, I think before I go further, I salute every one of you and wish you even greater success. In this context, I must say that whether I look at education like for example Shinas Kulkarni, my own brother-in-law, but it was 56 papers in nature which is probably the next one should be 12 or 13 or 14 or something like that. When I look at Rajett, you know who did an extraordinary job not just as head of McKinsey but in founding two extraordinary institutions, ISP and Public Health Foundation of India. I think it's a great contribution, something that in many ways reminded me of what Javal Neu did when he founded the IITs and he founded atomic energy etc. We have had wonderful successes in the corporate world. We have had wonderful successes in academia. I can go on and on and on. There is no end to it. And of course as entrepreneurs, there are so many of you who have succeeded so much, and I think your contribution in the valley and on Route 128 and in Research Triangle Park and other places have indeed put India on the global entrepreneurship map. So therefore, I think in some way we can all be very happy that at least a section of IITs have done human service to the country. They have raised the image of the country. They have made IIT a wonderful brand in many countries outside India. There is no doubt that IITs have also added value to India. They have participated in building modern India. Whether it's Wendy Banga who used to be the chairman of Hindustan Liieber, whether it's my friend Yogi Devishner who is the chairman of ITC, whether it is Jayram Romesh and Nand Dilki who are part of the union government, whether it is Arvin Khal, my friend Arvin Kal who has done a wonderful service to the cause of anti-corruption movement in India, it doesn't matter what area you go to, or Madu Pandit Das who has led Akshaira in bringing extraordinary value to the children in government schools by his wonderful project of feeding 1.3 million children every afternoon. So I think there is no doubt at all. I mean, our dir Subra who is the governor of Razle Bank. So almost in every field, I think IITs have done a great job and we are very grateful to them. We wish them even greater success as I wish you greater success. Therefore, it is appropriate that we are indeed celebrating the 50th year celebration of IITs and it's rightly so. But this is also a time when we have to think about, or when we have to take stock of where we are. What is it that we have achieved so far and where the other similar institutions from other countries are on this competition map, and what is it that we need to do to make sure that we continue to be on the front burner? We continue to be in the minds of the global influencers and the global thinkers. I think that in essence is really what our challenge today is. On the one hand we celebrate all the wonderful past, and on the other hand we say we create a road map to where we want to be 50 years from now, because when our grandchildren or great grandchildren celebrate the 100th year of IIT, I think we want them to be very proud of the fact that IITs indeed have added value. I think that in essence is our challenge.

Now what are our aspirations? As Anil pointed out, aspirations build civilizations, and the first responsibility of the leader is to raise the aspirations of his or her people. Our aspirations in essence has to be in the top 10 of the engineering schools in the world. At this point in time we are not. We are probably a couple of IITs are in the top 50. But I believe we will have to say we want at least five of the IITs which have already completed 50 years to be in the top 10 of the engineering institutions in the next 10 years or at best 20 years. Second, I would say that we have to have all these institutions in the top 200 of the Shanghai rankings. As you know, today there is no IIT in the top 300 entries in the Shanghai index, and the only institution that is there at something like 307 or so is the Indian Institute of Science. But I think we need to correct that. We have to make sure that all these institutions are at least in the top 100 of the Shanghai index. Of course, this is a much wider index because it includes full-fledged universities and not just technological institutes. We have to say that our students in the next 20 years will have to contribute to the betterment of India, just as you have all contributed to the betterment of developed nations like the US and UK etc. But I think it's time that we started thinking about how we can add value to our country, because as you people know, we have around 350 million people in the country who, according to my friend Monte Singalwalia, earned less than 80 cents a day, because he said the level of poverty he defined as those earning 32 rupees a day, which comes to something like probably 70 cents or something like that. That is not something which you and I can be truly proud of, because with 70 cents a day we all know you can't keep your body and soul together. Even if you have a family of five and you are earning $3.50 a day, it is very difficult to provide for the basic needs of your children. It is very difficult to send them to reasonable schools. It's very difficult to provide them decent nutrition. Therefore, I think as Nathan pointed out rightly, our challenge is to think of new methods whereby we can indeed provide better value for money to our people in the country. I think that will have to be a very important agenda on the table of the IITs as we move forward in some way. In other words, while you people have done a great job in adding value to this country, and of course many of you have added significant value to India through your participation in foundations, through your participation in the betterment of your alma mater, but at the same time I think now the agenda has to shift to how we can make India a better country, how we can make Indians stand up with confidence that we can indeed solve our problems, and I frankly don't know of any better instrument than higher education. One of the reasons why I have served on the board of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, on Cornell University, Wharton, and many of these institutions is simply because I truly believe that the best instrument that we have to create a better future for our country is to learn from these extraordinary institutions and create such institutions in India. I believe that that's the only way we can indeed solve the basic problem of poverty in the country, and I think that is a challenge that all of us will enjoy doing, that's a challenge that all of us will be enthusiastic about.

Whatever I am going to say today is based on the experience that I have had. As I said, working even today I work with Stanford, Cornell, University of Tokyo, Oxford, SMU, Monash in different capacities, and at Infosys we have connections with at least about eight or nine American universities. We have research projects going with about nine or ten universities, seven or eight of which are from the US. So whatever I'm going to say is based on my experience with these places. The first thing that we have to look at in the next 10 to 20 years is to ensure that IITs transcend from being just teaching institutions by and large to being reasonably good research institutions. It's true that IIT Bombay and a few IITs have done reasonably well by producing approximately 200 plus PhDs, thanks to my friend Shm Misha and Dwan Kakar and other IITs too, but the reality is we still, when we compare ourselves with institutions similar to IITs in this country, we clearly realize that we have a long way to go. For example, I was quite surprised to hear that in SOS and in SICOM, two of the most famous conferences, there is hardly any paper from Indian institutions. In fact, I don't know, I hope I'm wrong, when I heard that at the first SICOM conference held in New Delhi last year or year before, I don't remember, there was not a single paper from any Indian institutions. I mean, there were papers by people assembled here in the sense by people of Indian origin from universities here, but there was nothing from India, and I think that's not something that we can let happen. Similarly, when you look at the citation index, we have to be comparable to a Harvard, MIT, Caltech, CMU, Berkeley, Cornell, or Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Therefore, I think for us to make this happen, we must have good research as an important contribution in addition to having good teaching. What is it that we can do? I think first, all of us in this room and IITs in India as well as people concerned with higher education in India, we have to come together and we have to persuade our government to take some of these actions. First, we have to create an NSF kind of institution to fund research projects. Second, I think every faculty member has to be evaluated annually on research performance by a committee consisting of proven researchers from countries which have proved themselves well in research. In other words, ideally I would like to get people from this room to be a part of the committees that evaluate research output of faculty members in our IITs. Third, I think we'll have to move from the tenure system that we have in India to a five-year contractual appointment system for faculties. Fourth, I think we will have to encourage our faculty members to spend more and more time interacting with the industry. Let me give you a very simple data point. I'm an engineer. I believe in data. We have a saying at Infosys: in God we trust, everybody else brings data and facts to the table. Bangalore contributes 38% of about $60 billion of software exports, which means Bangalore alone contributes about $22 billion. It's not a small sum. Indian Institute of Science is located in Bangalore. We have not had a single request from any faculty member in the area of computer science who said, 'Look, what are your problems? We are interested in solving those problems.' Let me assure you, I can give you an hour's lecture on some of the most leading edge research problems that we have in our industry for the work that we are doing. In fact, I did give such a lecture at Stanford and at CMU, and they were so excited and we are doing several projects with them. The point I am making is that unless our faculty members in various IITs show a lot of interest in understanding our issues in making the industry much more competitive on a global scale, I don't think we will be in a position to add value through the IIT system to the country. Thanks to the coaching classes, today the quality of students entering IIT has gone lower and lower. Other than the top 20%, who will stand with the best anywhere in the world, there is no doubt about it, the other 80% because these coaching classes give them 10 or 15 patterns of problems to be solved, and it's only one of them that appears in the examination, they somehow get through this joint entrance examination, and the performance either in the IIT itself or in the job later or when they come for their higher education into some of the institutions here is really not as good as it used to be when most of you took the entrance examination. So this has to be corrected. A new method of selection of students to IIT has to be arrived at. We are also to provide much greater attention to both the social skills that somebody talked about and the English speaking skills as well as emphasis on social sciences as part of IIT. Today the quality of English that is spoken by students in IITs, if you leave aside again top 20 to 30% of the students, is not something that one gets too much confidence from, and the fact that our politicians are rooting against English is making this task more and more difficult. After all, an IITian has to be a global citizen. He must understand where the globe is going and therefore solve the problems of India so that India doesn't get left behind, and in order to do that, it's very important that there is much greater focus on English in IITs. I think I would suggest that there should be at least two courses every year on English in every one of four years, and similarly, I think probably maybe there should be two courses in social sciences and humanities every semester as part of the IIT curriculum. There has to be much greater emphasis on undergraduate research. One of the things that I found at Cornell was that they have a very flourishing undergraduate research program. Therefore, students who went through that became so adept in research. You know, my own son, for example, he wrote three papers as an undergraduate student and he wrote a chapter in a book on advances in pervasive computing. All that happened simply because there was focus on undergraduate research. I think we'll have to bring that back. We will have to have examinations which test independent thinking rather than just solving one of the problems. Second, I think we will have to increase the scholarship for our PhD students by a factor of three at least. Today it's somewhere around 8 or 10,000 rupees. I think if we want good students to continue the PhD program, we need to give at least 30,000 rupees so that the good students will not go to Infosys and Wipro of the world and they would go and do a great PhD. You know, I have suggested this to my friend Sanjay Lande, and I don't know where we are on this. It is a good idea to create an integrated six-year PhD program right after JEE and select probably something like the top 100 students in JEE. These are absolutely brilliant, wonderful fellows, there is no doubt about it, and if they can be persuaded to take an integrated six-year PhD program, I think it'll do wonders for the country. And we also have to provide an opportunity for our students to interact more and more with research workers with students in countries like this, and I think that's how we expand the horizon of students. We have to make sure that there are more and more students from well-known universities here who come to some of the IITs and take a semester worth of courses as part of the semester abroad program, and you people know very well that universities here have an established scheme for that and I can navigate to that. Some of them are doing it, but it's still not at a critical mass. I do believe that the only way IITs can become better is if the governing council of the IITs have 80% to 90% of its members coming from the alumni population. Having been on the board of several well-known universities here, in Japan, in the UK, I can tell you that there is nobody who is bothered about an institution much more than the alumni.