IIT Madras wants to come out with 1000 start-ups every year: Director

Average salary during job placements touches Rs 16.5 lakh, says V Kamakoti about institution ranked as India's best in higher education

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT-M) was last week declared the country’s best higher education institution, retaining that slot for the fourth year in a row in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). IIT-M’s director V Kamakoti spoke to Shine Jacob about the institute’s success, its plans to earn revenue and groom start-ups, and his views on the National Education Policy (NEP).

What follows are edited excerpts from the interview.

What are the reasons for your consistent success in NIRF ranking?

If you ask me for a single reason for our better performance, I would say it is the cohesion between faculty, administration, staff and students. During the period, our patents have gone up, innovations and outreach too improved; none of it was affected by the Covid.

NIRF has given a lot more focus on what areas we lag and what to do. In the last couple of years, we understood where we are lagging and where we have to improve. On an average, a faculty has been spending 14 hours a day working, which helped us to remain on top of the list. That’s how IIT is IIT. To make that time investment proper, we need effective governance, which we have put in place. Proper data collection and presenting it in an ideal way is also vital. I am looking at local relevance and global recognition.

We are doing pretty well on placements as well. Our average salary has touched Rs 16.5 lakh and we are trying to bring more and more companies.

How are you planning yourselves for the NEP implementation?

We have one very powerful message on NEP implementation, which is access to education. We have a course (BSc Degree in Programming and Data Science) which has multiple exits, multiple entries with no cap on the number of students and only a qualifying exam. There is no age cap. It is our flagship programme. There are 500,000 data scientists needed by India in the next five years across disciplines. Now, we are having around 12,500 and another 8,000 may join this year. On a steady stream, we want to make online education accessible to all.

We have various outreach programmes too. As per NEP we have to reduce the digital divide and rural areas have been our biggest focus. For real quality education, we have opened up a course called ‘out of the box thinking’ (100 hours) through mathematics and we have 130,000 registrations so far. We have been doing NPTEL (National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning) for years and online courses are nothing new for our faculty.

Do you think HECI (Higher Education Council of India) is going to change the funding aspects?

We are yet to see the final draft of HECI. I think it is a consolidation of all the higher education initiatives-- one ranking framework and one accreditation. Across the board, there is a need for consolidating. When all of us come and start talking in the same language and joint effort can take us forward with best practices.

In research output, patents, technology transfers and start-ups coming out, you are considered as the best. What are the reasons for it? 

We have an AI-based tool from a Chandigarh-based company Xlpat. That too is a very interesting tool, if you enter a keyword, it will tell what all the patents that are close to this are and what is the total market value. Then we get into idea design and prototype before being taken care off by incubators.

Then we have [the] Gopalakrishnan-Deshpande Centre that will look into mentoring these people and trying to make them commercial. Currently we are doing around 50-100 start-ups per year and want to scale it up to 1000 in another three years. The value of our start-ups in the last five to seven years is pegged at around Rs 30,000 crore.

What are the alternate modes of revenue generation that you are looking at?

We are given some reasonably good amount of grant by the government around Rs 600 crore, which is being used for salary, pension and some amount of infrastructural development. In addition, we have this HEFA loan (Higher Education Financing Agency), where the government pays the interest, we have to pay back the principal, which comes to a total of around Rs 850 crore (so far). Other things that we have is an institute of eminence for which Rs 1000 crore is coming on a yearly basis.

We are generating revenue through some educational programs, equity from IIT Madras incubated companies, CSR grants among others. We make around Rs 70 crore through CSR, which can easily go up to Rs 200 crore. We are also seeing a good increase in industrial consultancies too, where the revenue has crossed Rs 1,000 crore for the first time during the last year.