The prestigious engineering institutes of India, the Indian Institutes of Technology, will soon be the latest members of the NRI club, just like their many pass-outs. The government is planning to set up these esteemed academic institutions outside India after receiving recommendations from the National Education Policy (NEP).
How will the foreign IITs be related to the ones back home?
As per the recommendations of the NEP, the offshore campuses will be mentored by an IIT back home. IIT Delhi would be looking after the UAE campus, Subhas Sarkar, Minister of State for Education told the Lok Sabha in a written reply during parliamentary proceedings in the month of August. IIT Madras is reportedly trying to narrow it down between Tanzania, Nepal, and Sri Lanka.
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Faculty from Indian mentor IITs will be frequently transferred abroad and students from either institutions will have an option to be part of an exchange program.
Jai Arora, a Computer Science Engineering student from IIT Delhi, told Business Today, “It is exciting on some level, yes, but we also have to keep in mind that it will take the new institution, say for example, the one that might set up in UAE, some time to become a well-known or established academic institution. I am not sure if serious students would like to associate themselves or go there on an exchange program in the initial few years.”
Arora also pointed out that going on an exchange program, even if the institute is associated with the one back home, is expensive. He said, “We also have to keep other things in mind while choosing an exchange institution because it adds to our expenses, even if IIT Delhi facilitates the transfer.”
Interestingly, IIT Delhi students organised a protest last week over a hike in fee for its masters’ program. The college had to partially roll back the new fee structure. IIT Bombay students too had protested when fees was hiked earlier in the year.
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Will the foreign IIT campuses be at par with their Indian counterparts?
A seventeen-member committee led by IIT council standing chairperson K Radhakrishnan was formed to chart the specifics of offshore IIT campuses. The committee recommended that English should be the medium of instruction at all these branches, just like at the IITs in India.
Moreover, the committee also recommended that the institutions have B Tech, M Tech, and Ph.D. programs like their Indian counterparts in branches such as Computer Science and Information Technology, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Electronics to keep up with the speeding technological trends and industry requirements.
A professor from IIT Kharagpur told Business Today on the condition of anonymity that this plan to open up branches of IITs in foreign countries and maintain similar standards of education across all these branches might be a more difficult task than it seems on the surface. The professor noted that the institutions might face problems while designing a single entrance exam and drafting the syllabus for course work. This might also add to the woes of exchange students.
“An issue which would become evident in the coming times is the fact that the quality and standard of education is not the same across the globe. So setting up a standardised entrance test would be difficult but it would just be the beginning of it. Do you realise how hard it would be to draft a curriculum keeping in mind the capabilities of students in India and the offshore location? Each institution might end up having a different curriculum. This would make transfers and exchanges a bit tricky,” the professor said.
It is worth noting that the new branches of IIT, which will be set up abroad, will be called ‘Indian International Institute of Technology', followed by the name of the location they are set up at. United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia will be likely locations of these institutions in the Middle East. Sri Lanka and Nepal would be probable locations in South East Asia while Tanzania and Egypt are being considered as locations in the African continent.
The professor also pointed out logistical problems the new initiative might face. He said, “This new initiative might encounter some logistical hurdles. For example, the academic calendar is not the same all across the world, so it would be a problem to align semesters in mentor and mentee institutions.”
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