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Brain Curry: American campuses crave for IIT of glory.
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
Products of India's "Millionaire University," are the country's hottest exports since spices
WASHINGTON, Dec 7: The mechanical engineering department of the University of Maryland north of Washington DC is pretty much like any American educational faculty, save one. A full quarter of its 240 students are from India, and if you happen to bump into the boys at any of College Park eateries like Woodlands, Udipi, or Tiffin, you might think you were back in the canteen at Powai or Chennai. In the department itself, they have fairly simple thumb rule: Students from India, welcome; Students from Indian Institute of Technology, more than welcome.
Across the River Potomac south of Washington DC, the information technology school of the George Mason University is rather more impatient. Not for GMU hanging back and waiting for the IITians to arrive. Last year, the school hatched a plan to go out to India and woo up to 60 students each year with scholarships, a housing allowance, and a paid internship at a sponsor's company. "If we are to be the second coming of the Silicon Valley, we need talent like that in our area," reasoned Sudhakar Shenoy, founder President of the Information Management Consultants and an IIT alum who set up the program with dean Lloyd Griffiths.
UMD and GMU are in fact two of the less elite tech schools in the United States. But pressured by the rapid growth of a high tech corridor in Northern Virginia, they are now discovering what has long been a loosely held secret across the best universities in America, from Caltech in the West to MIT in the East. Out there in India, there is a school, fecund and bountiful, called the Indian Institute of Technology. It produces some of the most extraordinary engineering and technical minds in the world; a cornucopia of such academic excellence that it has now become a byword of brilliance. Says Greg Walsh, a UMD faculty member who has watched them stream into America, "They are an outstanding bunch, some of the best in the world."
The IITians might see that as a slight. According to a 1999 survey by Asiaweek magazine, though four of India's six IITs rank in the top ten of Asia's tech schools, they are placed fourth to seventh. Not for long, feel some alumni. The only reason they are not occupying the top four spots is because of shortcomings of infrastructure and facility. Man for man, IIT alumni pride themselves as being the best in the world with entry standards so rigorous that none but the very best make it. "When you come out of an IIT, you are the crème de la crème," says Naveen Jain, founder of the e-commerce upstart Infospace, a $ 2 billion company whose stock in the last eight weeks has zoomed from $ 48 to $ 130.
The story of IIT is now being celebrated in America from corporate boardrooms to floor of the stock market; from business magazines to the online sites. Suddenly, IIT has become more than just a highly-regarded technical school. "We have become a brand,' says IIT Mumbai Director S.P.Sukhatme, who was feted and feasted by US schools during a visit here in October. "Our long years of investment is paying off in the most unexpected way."
What really has brought the IIT out of the dreary academic closet into the flashy world of high finance is the incredible riches its alumni have run into, riding on the information technology revolution. From the latter day success stories of IITian veterans like Sycamore's Desh Deshpande and Keynote System's Umang Gupta to the fresh off the boat winners like Junglee.Com's Venky Narayan and Rakesh Mathur (all chronicled in this paper), IIT grads are suddenly seen as entrepreneurial geniuses with a midas touch. "Per capita, IIT has produced more millionaires than any other undergraduate institution," Salon Magazine gushed in the latest panegyric to the elite school that is rapidly being dubbed the "Millionaire University."
There are now an estimated 20,000 IIT alumni in the United States alone, almost 20 per cent of the 100,000 elites the school has produced since its inception in 1951. Prof Sukhatme estimates that some 5500 alumni from IIT Mumbai's output of 22,000 students are in the United States. According to Businessweek magazine, a full 30 per cent of the graduating class of over 500 students headed for the US in 1998. "So routine is the exodus that that at IIT Madras, the local campus postman and bank clerk provide unsolicited advice on the best U.S schools to attend. When acceptance letters arrive, the postman waits outside the student's door for a tip - a large one if it's from a highly regarded university such as Stanford," Businessweek wrote in a 1998 cover story on the India's most famous school.
Such romanticisation is routine at a time when American technical education is in crisis and standards are declining. Americans marvel at the IIT's exacting academic benchmarks - standards that allow a bare one per cent acceptance rate, compared to the plus ten per cent of the best US schools (Harvard has 13 per cent). Of the nearly quarter million Indian students who aspire to take IIT'ss gruelling entrance exam, less than 5000 make it. Even the toughest American schools agree that the IIT admission process is one of the most uncorrupted in India.
The terrifying ordeal of the IIT exams are legend even on US campuses where awed faculty and students looks upon desi grads as monster brains who have mastered science esoterica like Bernouli's Principles, Kekule's Dream, and Avogadro's Hypothesis before they have learnt to drive. One recent story spoke of how 24 IIT students once shared a single textbook taking two-hour shifts with it over a two day period. Another story spoke about the IIT-Bombay's first mainframe computer IIT bombay got in 1968 - a Russian-built Minsk II that "filled an entire floor of a building" and how Indian students wrote their own operating system to turn the behemoth into a primitive multimedia computer.
Some teachers rue the loss of such academic skills at the altar of financial success. UMD's Walsh says his biggest regret is less and less IITians are wanting to enrol for Ph.Ds as the entreprenerial world beckons them. But Director Sukhatme is more understanding. "There is nothing wrong in being rewarded for idea. The old notion that one has to work only for academic gratification is gone," he said, revealing that he had only just sent a congratulatory message to IIT alumni Rajesh Jain, who sold his portal Indiaworld to Satyam for nearly Rs 500 crore in the biggest cyberdeal in India.
Famous Silicon Valley IIT Alumni
Gururaj "Desh" Deshpande of Sycamore
Kanwal Rekhi formerly of Excelan/ Novell
Suhas Patil of Cirrus Logic
Vinod Khosla formerly of Sun Microsystems
Umang Gupta of Keynote Systems
Vinod Gupta of American Business Information
Romesh Wadhwani of Aspect Development
Naveen Jain of Infospace
Raj Mashruwala of TIBCO
Hemant Kanakia of Torrent Technology - IITB 1975
Sudhakar Shenoy Information Management Consultants
Venky Harinarayan. Rakesh Mathur, Anand Rajaraman and Ashish Gupta of
Junglee.com
In India
N.R.Narayana Murthy of Infosys
Nandan Nilekani of Infosys
Rajesh Jain of Indiaworld
Off the tech track
Victor Menezes of Citibank
Rakesh Gangwal of US Airways
Yogen Dalal of Mayfield
Rajat Gupta of McKinsey
Asiaweek's top ten science and technology schools in Asia for 1999.
1.Korea Advnaced Institute of Science and Technology
2. Pohang University of Science and Technology
3. Tokyo Institute of Technology
4. Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
5. Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
6. Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
7. Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
8. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
9. University of Science and Technology of China
10. Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Other stories of the series:
| Femme Fettle : In US, Indian women too get a taste of tech-tonic |
| Unknown Indian no nerd, he's cyber bold |