IIT Gandhinagar Decennial

The second generation IITs have completed 10 years (except two of them, which started a year later). Recently, IIT Gandhinagar organized a function to mark the occasion. They invited me to be present and publicly thanked me for whatever little I may have done in the last decade. This was a good time to recall many great initiatives that have been taken up by IITGN.

When Prof. Sudhir Jain became Director, IIT Gandhinagar in 2009, he asked me to be one of the many friends that IIT Gandhinagar would come to have, and spend just one day a month at that IIT. Given the logistics, costs, and overhead of travel, I promised to visit alternate months and spend on an average 2 days in each visit. And sure enough, this was my 59th visit to Ahmedabad in just a little over 9 years.

When I look at IIT Gandhinagar, it is obvious what a great leadership can do to an institution. And a great leader is not just one who can keep coming up with great ideas, but has an eye for leaders around him/her who will come up with equally great ideas themselves. Poor leaders, on the other hand, can only promote mediocrity or worse.

Though a lot of innovative thinking has gone into the policies and processes at IIT Gandhinagar, some of them have simply followed common sense. Indeed, the best example of the difference is that they treat an 18-year old as an 18-year old. It is common sense, and yet most institutions would think of under-graduate students (even 21-year olds) as juveniles. The Institute respects its students as adults, trusts them to do the right things always, and students don't let the Institute down. Treating them as adults mean not involving parents, unless the situation is serious. Adulthood means that they have a greater say in running their own affairs (hostels, festivals, discipline, mess) and have a significant say in running of the Institute. In return, the students ensure there are no headaches for the Director from their side There is huge affection for the Institute, and that shows up in statistics like the fraction of alumni giving a gift to the Institute in a year - perhaps the highest of all Indian institutions.

Another simple idea is to have liberal rules. When I was a student at IITK, we were really free birds. The rules did not matter as anything we wanted to do, we could request and it would be considered on merit and not in light of the rules. And if this request was for something worthwhile, it would be approved. But things did not stay the same 3 decades later. With student-faculty ratio declining sharply, it wasn't possible to consider each request on its merit. A lot of times, we started hearing, "rules are meant to be followed" and we found out that rules did not allow many things we took for granted as students. IIT Gandhinagar had always said that they wanted to learn from errors older IITs had made. And they decided that right from the very beginning, the flexibility will be inbuilt into the rules, and not depend on someone taking a positive decision on your application on a case-to-case basis. And the flexibility shows in branch change rules, having flexibility in curriculum like minors, honours, double majors, and many many more situations.

My favorite visits to IIT Gandhinagar have been to attend their annual Academic Advisory Council meetings and their annual Leadership Conclaves. The two are held on consecutive days. For AAC, they invite academicians who have lots of ideas and are from any part of the globe. In LC meetings, they invite people from industry, government, alumni, and academia. Typically, they will discuss academic issues in institution building in AAC and administrative/governance issues in institution building in LC. New institutes have to be open to external viewpoints since they may not have sufficient internal capacity. But even with this caveat, IIT Gandhinagar has been exceptionally outward looking. One of the advice that I heard during these meetings was that while any educational institute will take a long time to be truly world class, one need not wait to start thinking and functioning like one. So when you have to create a policy for anything, think about how a world class university would do this. This way of thinking and doing things has ensured that IIT Gandhinagar's march towards excellence has been faster than what it would have been otherwise.

Even though a new institute struggles with several problems - faculty recruitment, building of infrastructure, and so on, IIT Gandhinagar has always proclaimed that as a public funded institute, it must be open to not just its students and faculty but many more people. So they allow students of other colleges to spend a semester doing courses at IIT Gandhinagar. They have a large program of summer interns on their campus. They even have special programs for foreign students in winter. They run several training programs for teachers of other colleges. They allow non-students to set up companies in their incubation center (and now building a technology park). And all this seems to help them a lot. They attract more applications for Masters and PhD programs in a single department than the MTech/PhD applications in IIT Kanpur in all departments put together.

IIT Gandhinagar has several agreements with foreign universities and companies for summer internships, semester exchanges, research collaborations, etc. They want their graduates to have a global exposure. A very large fraction of their students would have spent some time abroad during their program. However, not all agreements are fully funded. This means that under normal circumstances, some of those programs are not accessible to students coming from financially challenged backgrounds. But not at IIT Gandhinagar. They have programs that will provide support to such students so that they too have equal access to any and all programs that IIT Gandhinagar is involved in. Much of this support comes from gifts from friends. They raise more philanthropic funds in a year than some of the old IITs.

One of the most innovative programs that they have is their Foundation Program. Every under-graduate student admitted to IIT Gandhinagar goes through a 5-week program in which their are large number of talks, workshops, discussion sessions, projects and outdoor activities. Students develop a broad set of life skills including creativity (music, drama, painting, art), sports, leadership, empathy, societal concerns, and inculcate values and ethics. This is their most famous export, and now many IITs and even other institutes have started doing similar programs.

Another interesting program is Explorer Fellowship in which a student is given a small budget to travel across India for 6 weeks. The budget of less than Rs. 1000 per day is to be used for travel (only non-AC travel allowed), stay, food, and any other personal expense. They must visit a state in South, North and North-East of India. The students not only understand the diversity of the country, but also understand the circumstances under which our people live. Another summer fellowship scheme is "Gram Fellowship" in which the student is expected to live in a rural setting.

No wonder that they care so much for everyone working for them. The facilities they have asked the contractors to create for construction workers, for example, are absolutely amazing. Each outsourced employee gets some benefits which are unheard of at other places. For example, they have created a Children's Education Fund through which some educational expenses of children of contract employees are taken care of.

There are far too many innovative ideas that IIT Gandhinagar has implemented than what I can list here. But suffice to say that my association with them for the last 9+ years have been extremely fulfilling. There are lots of faculty members with whom I have interacted with and all of them have given me new ideas and perspectives.