'The premium IIT graduates demand is hard to justify'

Anand Deshpande is founder and CEO of software product engineering company Persistent and a former IIT student. He provides BT's Goutam Das a recruiter's perspective on the IITs.

On hiring from IITs: I don't recruit many people directly from the IITs. They are not available. Graduates from IITs demand a lot more salary and they want to work with the multinationals. The premium they demand is hard to justify. Their salaries are twice the salaries of people from other engineering graduates.

On the quality of faculty: Many in the faculty have grown old. They do not keep up with what is happening in the rest of the world. Students have way too many choices now. I work very closely with IIT Bombay. I do two to three lectures a year there. I am familiar with the faculty of the Computer Science Department. About 20 per cent of the people there are pushing and running all the time. But a lot of the guys don't keep up with new stuff and are not publishing. People have to push harder today. The energy they have in the class is important.

On the impact of reservations in IITs: It is a problem in the class. Part of the class is ahead and others drag the class behind.

On preferring a foreign university to an IIT: The best thing about IITs is the network - I benefited from it. That will not happen abroad in a smaller university. But it is definitely easier to go abroad. My daughter is in the United States now as an undergraduate. She just refused to go through the IIT entrance.