Letters: Infrastructural deficiencies

The editorial "Quality, not quantity" (January 24) focusses on a few important issues relating to the setting up of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). The conflict between quality and quantity is minimised if capital is abundant, but in practice, capital is a scarce resource. The setting up of new IITs, therefore, inevitably means diverting capital investment from the existing campuses at a time when intakes in these institutes are going up significantly. As a result, infrastructural deficiencies in the exisiting institutes are also showing up. The Anil Kakodkar Committee Report's target of producing 10,000 doctoral fellows annually by 2020-25 has fallen victim to the same fallacy of conflating quality with quantity. The doctoral products from existing Indian institutions, as the demand from industry underlines, have very few takers. Hence, enhancing output without quality control is just as senseless as creating IITs without adequate infrastructural support.

Indranil Chakraborty, Bangalore

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