NO MORE IITS PETITION
Hon.Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh & Hon.HRD Minister Mr.Arjun Singh,
It took a great visionary like Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to create the five IIT's, getting UNESCO, USA, Germany, UK & Russia to fund, furbish, staff them and nurture them for ten years. It took 125000 IITian's 50 long years to establish the IITs as a Global Brand Name, aided by the autonomous structure & funds granted to the IITs by the Government of India.
This valuable Brand name belongs to the Indian Government, the IIT administrators and the real achievers, the alumni of IITs who have done the nation proud. Such excellence and recognition has to be achieved the hard way and is neither transferable nor can it be gained by association of the name.
We understand that, towards enhancing the quality of education in India there are now, moves afoot to name several existing colleges as IITs. While the governments overall goals are laudable, we would like to strongly urge honourable ministers to consider the potential damage to the IIT brand name, by such a move.
Instead, we urge the government to name these colleges as Hindustan Institutes of Technology (HITs) or a more suitable name, give them better funding than IITs and further empower them to succeed under their own brand name by making them all operationally autonomous along the lines of the IITs. Let the Govt create healthy competition between IITs and HITs and even go a step further and make faculty transferable between IITs and HITs so every one benefits through this exchange.
Taking the concept further HITs can benefit even more from official joint ventures with foreign universities of repute in countries like USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore. This will encourage annual exchange of faculty and UG and PG students..besides raising research to international standards. What better way to accelerate this new Brand name and give IITs good healthy competition ?
The GOI should fund not just seven but many more engineering colleges in India, at least one in each state for a start, to raise their standards and to significantly increase the well-trained manpower pool of the nation, which is of national strategic interest especially in the IT/ITES and other emerging economic sectors.
However, we request you to please refrain from calling these colleges IITs or Deemed IITs since a brand name typically only gets diluted when it gets distributed around. After all, there is only one Oxford, one MIT, one Harvard, one Cambridge, one Sydney University in the world.
We strongly feel that the proposal to rename the seven existing colleges Deemed IITs will result in fourteen doomed IITs, a few years down the road. Please do not downgrade the nation's Temples of Technology & Islands of Excellence, the IITs, that visionaries in your party played a key role in building soon after independence.
The Brand Name that IIT's hold today are a result of their intellectual capital, quality infrastructure, selective intake of students through JEE, and most of all, operational autonomy. Above all, the five primary IITs have managed to evolve a unique academic culture over the last fifty years and that culture will be hard to replicate at any other institution. The culture includes components such as faculty who were all recruited for an IIT right from the beginning, inputs from foreign sponsors into the formation and development of each IIT, high quality students from the day of formation etc. which will be difficult to replicate at any other institution that has already been in existence for several years and has developed its own culture.
The Nation will salute the Prime Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh and HRD Minister Mr.Arjun Singh for making the right decision that will serve our children of future generations.
Petition Created by:
Ram Krishnaswamy, B.Tech, IITM-1970
Dr.V.N.Sharma, M.Tech, IITK-1978
Sriram Vajpayam, B.Tech, IITM-1985
Bhuvan Prasad, B.Tech, IITK-1982
K.K.Subramanian, B.Tech, IITKgp-1970
Ashish Agarwal, B.Tech, IITM-1997
Atif Hussain, B.Tech, IITK-2003
Barun Kumar, B.Tech, IITK-1992
Ramakrishnan Rajamani, B Tech, IITM 1965
Raj Varadarajan, B.Tech IITM-1966
Sanat Agrawal, BTech, IITK-1988
Ajay Kumar Singh, B.Tech, IIT-R-2003
Varun Arya, M.Sc, IItd-1976
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