There can be little question that the Indian Institutes of Technology — once described by former US President Bill Clinton in a speech to American audiences as being among the “great engineering colleges of the world” — and the Indian Institutes of Management are among the foremost centres in the world for imparting technology and management education.

The IITs in particular have an enviable record in the quality of their alumni who have shone in private industry across the world. An IIT degree is often fused with an IIM diploma to give an aspirant an edge in industry and business, where the competition is razor sharp at the higher levels. The health of these two, besides a clutch in other fields, is naturally of interest and concern to this country as they have to do with the quality of higher education and the availability of quality human resources to different fields of endeavour that have a bearing on taking India forward. This was indeed the motivation which drove Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, all those decades ago, to take a special interest in setting up institutions of learning in science and engineering that would rear generations of students of the highest bracket who would become levers of self-reliance and excellence. It is natural for our people to show concern for the IITs and IIMs, but to set off an out-of-season debate is another matter. Minister of state for environment Jairam Ramesh unnecessarily set off a flurry this week when he described the IITs and IIMs as “excellent”, but not “world class”.
Mr Ramesh is entitled to his views as a citizen, but a minister in the government — in whose hands lies much of the financial and administrative control that can make or break the institutes in question — is expected to give greater evidence of balance and sense of occasion in his utterances. Since educational institutions fall within the purview of other areas of the government, not the environment ministry, Mr Ramesh also exceeded his brief as minister and stepped into regions superintended by other UPA-2 colleagues, not expectedly inviting a riposte, and setting off a fruitless debate. Such a discussion within the right forum — say Parliament, when appropriations for departments and ministries are being debated — would have served a purpose, drawing attention to key aspects in the working of IITs and IIMs (and other institutions). But the way it turned out, we only have been witness to sterile fulminations.
The minister’s off-the-cuff remarks presumably meant that the IITs and IIMs do not produce adequate cutting-edge research. The reasons are many, and Mr Ramesh might have done well to reflect on them in public as he took a swipe at the famous institutions. Indeed, he might have struck a sympathetic chord with his interlocutors had he noted that within the monies available to them these colleges were doing a fine job, but are still way behind famous American, European, or even some Chinese centres of academic excellence for want of funds. To take an example, if India spends $8 billion on research, the US spends $250 billion. This gap in the minister’s public expression has been filled by human resources development minister Kapil Sibal, who drew attention to the crucial difference in “eco-systems”, picking an expression that might be otherwise in the toolkit of the environment minister! The funds crunch can be addressed when private industry spends more on research (for which it might need a tax break), and top educational institutions come to enjoy greater academic autonomy and freedoms, and can offer their faculty higher remunerations and better work conditions. It is in the end a systemic matter going far beyond particular educational institutions.