Engineering success at the IITs: The story behind an enduring brand

Prabhat Kumar's book traces the rise of the IIT ecosystem over 75 years, celebrating its achievements while prompting debate on whether India's premier institutes are ready for the future

IIT: The Story of India’s Most Prestigious Educational Ecosystem by Prabhat Kumar

Published by HarperCollins

288 pages Rs 899

  The Indian Institutes of Technology — collectively known as the IITs — constitute India’s most prestigious educational ecosystem. There are now 23 IITs, the oldest being IIT Kharagpur, which is celebrating the platinum jubilee of its founding. Over the decades, 22 sister institutions have followed. To be fair, while the IITs have legitimately earned huge brand recognition in the US, one must also credit the meritocracy of that country for the brand’s global reputation.

 

The IIT system has produced nearly half a million alumni during these 75 years, with IIT Kharagpur accounting, by one estimate, for approximately two-fifths of them. Has any other Indian educational institution produced an output that is so prolific? No institution is perfect, and the IIT system has its share of shortcomings.

 

The IITs are a tribute to successive governments, visionary founders, dedicated professors, administrators and 500,000 graduates who have collectively made an impressive contribution to science, technology, entrepreneurship, industry, public administration, and national development—many on the global stage and some within India. Prabhat Kumar’s book aims to define the mysterious secret sauce of success. The author approaches this question with an engineer’s discipline: he disassembles the system into its constituent parts, analyzes each one, and then reassembles them to reveal the whole.

 

The serious reader may appreciate this methodology. At times, however, the approach may read like a prosaic bill of materials and may not appeal equally to every reader. Consider these extracts:

• “In a world hungry for role models, the IITs offer a blueprint: that excellence is not an accident but a culture, built on one experiment, one equation, one dream at a time.”
• “Nehru’s intervention was decisive, which was formalised in the Act of 1961—that IITs would be granted unprecedented autonomy as institutions of national importance, governed by their own senate and free from bureaucratic meddling … the IITs would be factories for nation-builders.”
• “By the 1970s, the examination—now formally called the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)—had acquired the reputation as the world’s toughest … the JEE was notorious for never repeating questions.”
• “By 2024, Kota transformed into nearly 250,000 students and a turnover of~15,000 crore … Kota transformed into a temple town where the God was JEE.”
• “The journey from the pressure cooker of coaching to the IIT campus is no escape … the fresher realises that he or she is merely one among hundreds of identical demigods … the reset is violent, absolute and psychologically devastating.”
• “The real education here is not only in the lecture halls. But in the art of living—fiercely, joyfully and on one’s own terms. This is the antidote to pressure.”

Many IIT graduates sought opportunities abroad and entered a wide variety of professions. The book recounts that actor Shah Rukh Khan cleared the JEE but did not join an IIT—perhaps because, as one might jokingly suggest, a kuch kuch hota hai feeling was already stirring within him. Prabhat, an IIT Delhi alumnus and currently head of the Pan IIT Foundation, joined the Indian Revenue Service. I am an IIT Kharagpur alumnus, who began his career as a computer programmer at Hindustan Lever but later moved into general management. 

Over time, increasing numbers of IIT graduates entered startups, investment banking, venture capital, consulting, sales, entertainment, and other professions that, to the casual observer, bore little resemblance to traditional engineering. There are, of course, also examples of alumni who worked in agricultural fields, hydroelectric projects, blast furnaces, and Indian defence factories, but they appear to represent a small proportion of the 500,000 graduates.

 

Does the migration of engineers into unrelated professions represent a waste of public money—or does it demonstrate the broader value of a rigorous technical education? That is a lively and important question. The author does not quite address this aspect.

 

Prabhat concludes: “In the end, the greatest asset the IITs possess in this new race is neither financial nor purely technical. It is philosophical. It is motivational, the intrinsic drive to build for a purpose larger than oneself is an edge that no algorithm can copy and no amount of compute power can buy—this is the ultimate advantage. While other nations may build artificial intelligence with great resources, the IIT ecosystem is building it with vast purpose.”

 

What the book is silent on is whether the IITs are future-ready. Is their research output commensurate with their national role in the Viksit Bharat programme? Can they become so research-competent that Indians abroad wish to return to the IITs? Have they developed strong industry linkages to accelerate research productivity? Are IITs doing enough to be beacons of knowledge for the future? Or are they bogged down in the quagmire of bureaucratic control like some of our formerly well-known universities?

 

Mani Bhaumik, the first-ever PhD in Quantum Physics from Kharagpur in 1958, rose from a mud hut in Midnapore to a distinguished scientific career in Los Angeles. He helped pioneer excimer-laser technology, which later made procedures such as LASIK possible, and wrote the celebrated book Code Name God. Suhas Patil, from the Class of 1965, founded Cirrus Logic in Silicon Valley and built what might now be described as an early “unicorn,” although the term had not yet been coined. Vin Gupta, from the Class of 1967, travelled from Kharagpur to Nebraska and later founded InfoUSA, creating an enormous database covering millions of businesses and households. Why did so many of them have to achieve their laurels abroad?

 

Perhaps this book did not seek to address such complex questions. But the questions linger. Ultimately, the IIT system is not the creation of any one individual. It is the result of the patient compounding of thousands of seemingly small acts performed by tens of thousands of talented and committed Indians. That cumulative effort has created an educational ecosystem whose influence extends far beyond engineering—and far beyond India.

For half a million alumni, this book is a nostalgic and proud read. For those in education policy and planning for the future, a second book will be awaited from Prabhat Kumar.

 

The reviewer is an author and corporate commentator