Prof. Sadgopan: "Institutes must be transparent"

A world-class institution has universal outlook in terms of vision, objectives, processes and people. For example, as its vision it must want to be in the top cohort among its peers. This does not mean that it necessarily has to be the biggest. But it has to be the best among its peers, even if it is a niche area like classical music.

The objective must be pursuit of knowledge, rather than mere training or financial viability. It must put in place processes that are fair and transparent for recruitment of faculty members, students and staff members.

The transparent process must include evaluation, redress of grievances, resource generation, partnership with alumni, other academic institutes, government, media and civil society. It must be open to people who are competent, ‘best in class’, from all sections of the society, with no artificial limits.

India has many institutes that are already near ‘world class’. We need to enable them to reach the goal without entangling them in archaic rules and regulations. We must evaluate them on larger mission objectives rather than finding fault for silly process issues like minor error in procurement or recruitment. Why not celebrate success rather than look down on excellence as elitist, just because it is exclusive? Sometimes excellence leads to some people getting excluded; to keep ‘exclusion’ as a principle is bad; but exclusion arising out of excellence must be viewed carefully and efforts to be inclusive must be encouraged. 

We also need to re-visit our investment in ‘world class’ institutions. We often complain of institute x, y, z in India not on the world class university list in USA or Singapore, without realizing that such institutes invest 10 to 100 times more and give lots of freedom to those Institutions.

Let there be use of technology for recruitment, registration, dissemination, and interaction in all aspects of 4L’s of learning - Lecture, Library, Laboratory and Life. For example, IIIT-B had been an ‘e-enabled institute’ from Day 1. The regulators should become output-focused than input-focused. Instead of government controlling input through so many CET’s, seats through AICTE, fees through Ministry diktat, funding through complicated processes, let us move to an ‘output-oriented’ regime where grants are released based on number of students graduated (with higher incentives for high performance students). Permit institutes to levy fair fee and share financial information publicly with standardized audit processes. Once done, the scene will completely change and we will be a vibrant academic system comparable to the best in the world. Currently, the good players who are law-abiding resist entry. ‘Purely money making’ parties enter with interesting formulas like 5-5-50 (5 crores investment leading to 50 crores return in five years, which is apparently not uncommon.

We must have reliable information about the quality, scope and prospects of courses. We must also have information on course and ability match, course and job prospects match including published and real costs and institutes’ position (claimed vs. real).  Many so-called rankings and surveys are part of ‘advertorials’ and are a far cry from reality. ‘Average Salary’ is used as a measure that favours ‘fly by night’ operators who ‘cook up’ data, fictitious appointment letters etc. We are steeped in the past and not forward looking. In trying to control ‘bad’ elements we stifle ‘good’ players.

It will take time and no quick fix is possible. Once again, we need ‘grades’ of institutes. There’s no point in forcing every institute to become ‘copycat IIT/IIM’. No point in artificially expecting every one to publish x number in Tier I Journal/ Conference. One needs to attend top-tier conferences year after year for which funding is needed. Exercises like the recently started SERB (Science & Engineering Research Board) that will make research money in reasonably large quantum available to any quality researcher through ‘blind peer review’ process is indeed a very healthy development.

(As told to Rajaram Sukumar)