Engines of innovation

IITs' new focus on research is welcome

Speaking at the annual convocation of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in August this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned that societies — and, by implication, educational systems — that did not innovate stagnated. The IITs have long been India’s best-known and best-regarded institutions of excellence, which is presumably why the prime minister chose the IIT-B convocation as the location for this exhortation. But the lesson is one that the IITs may already have taken to heart, as a series of special reports in this newspaper has shown. It is clear that a new agenda that puts research