‘JEE Advanced rank is just an integer’: IIT Madras director on Zanzibar campus, suicides, sports quota

NEW DELHI: At the inauguration of IIT Madras Zanzibar campus, V Kamakoti, director, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras spoke to Careers360 at length about the proposal to include a sports quota and other measures to help students cope on campus; the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, (NAAC) assessing the IITs; challenges of conducting the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced in regional languages; having one exam for Centrally Funded Technical Institutes (CFTIs) and how schooling needs to change for that to be successful and more. Edited excerpts below.

Q. The internationalisation of the IIT Madras happened in just six months. How did this happen?

We had a three-point agenda: we must go to a country that needs such an institute; we need to consider whether the government is willing to support us; and school education must be good because we get a good crop of students to come to the campus. Tanzania fits these criteria very well. Further, Binaya Srikanta Pradhan, Indian Ambassador to Tanzania, took care of everything.

When the proposal was sent to the Tanzanian government, their team came to IIT Madras. Later, we also made a quick survey and both parties made two-three trips. We are the educational partners and the Tanzanian government took care of the complete investment including land, building, teachers and everything else. Ministry of education, ministry of external affairs and cabinet approvals were also needed, but everyone was quite keen and everything happened quickly. Also, much trust was built between the IIT Madras and Zanzibar teams. If India wants to become a superpower and leapfrog, this IIT Madras Zanzibar campus is a case study. This is the speed in which we need to work.

Also, as a male director, I think the balance should go that side right now. I'm very happy that a lady is going to lead the IIT. It's a big source of joy for me. Both Preeti Aghalayam and Ligy Philip are two women leading IIT Madras Zanzibar.

Q. Other than BSc and MSc in Data Science, which other courses are in the pipeline at IIT Madras Zanzibar?

Bachelors in cyber-physical systems and ocean engineering will also be launched soon. Also, a data science lab will be set-up in the campus which is computing and cloud computing. Once we have the next set of cyber physical systems, we'll have robotics and another four-to-five interesting labs set-up at the campus. We are starting with 70 students because there is a gap and data science will fill the gap. We are also trying for foreign collaborations.

Faculty Accommodation at IIT Madras Zanzibar, Tanzania

Q. During the recent 55th IIT Council meeting, the council accepted NAAC accreditation. How will that pan out?

We are currently debating on it. Frameworks are being evolved on how IITs will be evaluated as against how the universities are evaluated. There are some fundamental differences that have to be taken care of.

For instance, there is a difference in how an IIT department and a university department are seen. Also, at some point, everyone has to have one accreditation, one ranking for the country. It will start happening soon. However, the only issue is that there must be a clear understanding of how IIT systems work. Once the framework comes, all IITs will come forward.

Q. The National Credit Framework (NCrF) adoption was also approved recently.

From the curriculum point of view, IITs have a credit-based system and we are now moving into an interdisciplinary area. We are working on how IITs can fit into it and we realise that we already fit into it to a large extent.

Our focus is now on interdisciplinary education, which is coming up very quickly.

Further, multiple-entry and exit syncs with the credit system. We are experimenting with multiple-entry and testing to see how the NCrF works for IIT systems.

Q. There has been a proposal to have a common entrance test for all CFTIs. What's your opinion?

JEE Advanced is an interesting examination and we need a bell-curve distribution. There is extreme competition for an IIT seat. There was a court case last year where parents had gone to court for a .6 mark which includes relative grading (RG). RG is not how well a student performs, it depends on how badly others perform. This is the kind of competition we are dealing with. Hence, we need a legally tenable way of selecting students. There is a fundamental difference between the education that we impart and others. Many universities ask students whether they have understood the concept; in the IIT systems, we ask problems that use that concept.

Understanding the concept alone is not enough, a student should also understand how they can use the concept in an important scenario. In JEE Advanced, no question has been repeated ever.

However, for the new courses, we are trying to use the already-available examinations.

For BS data science, we have a cap on the number of seats and just an eligibility test for which we give training. But that is basically logical thinking with students from all backgrounds to join. The idea of conducting a single engineering exam which will take care of all private and deemed engineering colleges is a good idea, but then we should also understand the level of IITs.

If we are thinking of one examination for all, then our school curriculum should prepare for this kind of standard.

In this reference, the education ministry has asked all IITs to have well-trained teachers. Hence, many of the IITs and NITs today have started running BEd programmes.

At IIT Madras, we want to offer BSc+ Maths+ CS+ BEd as a sandwich four-year programme and create good teachers. We are in discussion with Tata Institute of Social Sciences to help us with this programme. There should be a mechanism for Kendriya Vidyalayas and others to come for campus recruitment for these courses and take these teachers and give them good salaries. Further, the government has to hire these people into their systems and essentially subsidise their education.

Q. There was also a conversation on conducting JEE Advanced in regional languages.

Currently we are conducting JEE Advanced in two languages – Hindi and English. The main issue is translation. Translating science into traditional languages is a challenge. Many times, everything depends on the language. Sometimes it even confuses students. When I was JEE chairman in 2011 many students wanted Hindi question papers but shifted to English in the middle of the exam as we had printed two separate questions.

If we keep questions in different languages, the issue is whether students will understand the question and what terms can still be in English and which ones in regional languages. This requires careful analysis. We need people who understand these 23 respective languages along with keeping the question paper very confidential. We need 23 professional language experts with knowledge in respective domains of the JEE Advanced syllabus. That is a challenge!

Q. There is a perception that the environment at IITs is pushing vulnerable students to suicide or to drop out. What do you think about it?

I firmly believe that students should not be forced and request that parents to not pressure students and allow them to do what they want to do. I never cleared the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE). Still, the same institute which denied my BTech admission gave me MS admission after I cleared GATE [Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering], Phd admission, appointed me as an assistant professor and gave me many promotions, finally to a director of the institute.

In Kota, many students have been dying by suicide and the pressure starts from there. When they enter IITs, they are already tired. Parents must let the child pursue their interests.

Also, people are trying to find innovative ways to crack the JEE Advanced examination which can be changed over every year. But that's not the solution. At the grassroot level, parents must observe what the student is interested in. Unless we fix this mindset problem, people will keep running after pay packages. I have always asked students to focus on studies and become relevant in their field. Pay will automatically come.

Q. You also proposed a sports quota. Why and will it be implemented?

This is the way to address suicides at IITs. In short, the child misses childhood which includes playing, which is now missing. Further, we also want diversity on campus. We have a couple of national representatives at IIT Madras. We want to basically have a quota similar to that of the defence services.

If the candidate has lost their parents or is permanently disabled, they can apply for the quota with a certificate from competent authority for the supernumerary seats. We have 13 different courses for which we want to offer one such supernumerary seat for each course. We intend to initiate this quota from 2024 admissions onwards and hopefully it will be announced in the next month so that institutes get some preparation time.

The IIT council unanimously appreciated the proposal. We are almost on the final leg. JEE can be a magnet to bring such reforms to inculcate sports activities among candidates. Sports help students inculcate the maturity to learn from failure. Initially, there will be a few levels that students must have cleared to get admission under the quota. There are chances that initially there will be few or no students. But in the long run, it'll get full.

Q. Recently the Supreme Court asked UGC and universities to state the steps taken against discrimination against students from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and other marginalised communities. What has been done?

Sensitisation is the only solution. At IIT Madras, we have made a high power committee for discrimination against SC/ST and OBC students. Other than caste, there is rank-based discrimination. So, these students are very young and the question is how do we remove this discrimination at this stage? The point is, can we not even disclose the rank?

One of the things that we are proposing is that in the first year everybody will do a common course; and based on the performance, they will go to the next year.

What has been done previously by CBSE was to remove marks in Class 10. And through grades we remove the discrimination.

In orientation, faculties are made clear to never ask the JEE rank or caste of the students.

Rank and caste are mentioned only at the time of admission. But admission is a process where there are well-defined rules with well defined cut-offs. And these ranks and cut-offs have to be announced for the admission process. This is all a necessity in the act of transparency. So it's a two-edged sword where we have to announce the cut-offs and ranks for each category.

We are not consistently talking to students and explaining that the JEE rank is just an integer; CGPA, a number; and Lanquil, an online AI-based comprehensive English learning platform to help people with English and communication skills.

Discrimination is also a subjective topic. What seems discrimination to me may not be for someone else.

Q. There is a rise in vacant seats across traditional engineering courses in engineering colleges with students keen towards data science and artificial intelligence-focussed courses. What should be done to solve this?

Every year we need 25,000 employable electronics engineers in the country. People want to go for jobs that pay well. But as a country, we have to look at the need to build up the informal and formal sectors and if those sectors don't do well, India will collectively fail.

Unless you have basic infrastructure in place and certain engineers to support the basic infrastructure, the country cannot grow. So the point is, when we and many others all came to academia, leaving our well-paid engineering jobs, it was mainly out of passion.

So passion is something fundamental and we have to create that passion. And people are passionate about their startups and ideas; hence we have students becoming employers and not employees.

We have set up a complete innovation stack at IIT Madras which students run. We also have a pre-incubator called Nirmaan which converts your design into a prototype. We also have five incubators: one is on health technology, rural technology, cyber-physical systems which support students to transform their ideas into startups. Then we have Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship (GDC), where we nurture the startups to become big and we have a robust patenting mechanism.

I wish at least 20-30% of IIT Madras students become entrepreneurs and employers. Last year, IIT Madras' startup, Agnicul, recruited the highest number of students from the campus.

Inculcating the idea of entrepreneurship is a crucial thing for our country in 2047 to become a superpower. As a director today, I need to drive this 25 year vision into my IIT right now. We need to protect all our ideas along with our IPs. Also, we need to have indigenous technology made in India, owned by Indians.

We also took 50 girls and 50 boys from Class 9 from different districts of Tamil Nadu. Now we have added massive CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] programmes, taken 252 government schools, and trained their teachers on how to experiment. We are sending kits to government schools where kids will do 25 experiments each with 100 experiments along with a small project. This initiative will help students to know the fundamentals of electronics and electrical circuits which will be helpful till the third day of engineering.

We are targeting 100 schools and 100 students per class. Even if 20% of this lot pursues electronics engineering with passion, we are getting 5,000 engineers per year.

Q. During the recent IIT Council meeting, IITs showed interest in holding equity in startups they incubate like other big institutions globally. How is that panning out?

According to income tax regulations, IITs must be recognised as incubators to hold equity. While IITs have their own incubators as Section 8 companies, the problem comes if we are both an institute and an incubator. IIT Bombay came out with a proposal for IITs to hold equity and we will make an attempt on this.

Also, holding equities is very important because if we nurture the companies, the return should come back to the institute, making the institute self-sustainable. We are hopeful that NRF (National Research Foundation) will try to bring in a national facility for equipment to be placed at one central point and be distributed from there.