Functioning from the premises of the Ordinance Factory in Medak, Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad, expects to move into a 580-acre permanent location by July 2013. The institute aims to become an R&D destination and is involved in collaborative partnerships with local industries. IIT-H Director Professor Uday B Desai talks about his future plans with B Ramakrishna. Edited excerpts:
What are your plans for the institute?
Our vision is to stay focused on research, which has been the hallmark of IITs and which we rephrased as inventions and innovations, and of course, excellence in teaching. Second, we would like to be a large-scale operation. We are targeting 20,000 students on campus — half of them will be undergraduates and the other half postgraduates, PhDs, and postdoctoral students. Other established IITs have 7,000-8,000 students.
How do you envisage the role of IITs? Are they the “incubators of socially-relevant technology” as Pandit Nehru envisaged, or in meeting skilled manpower needs of the economy?
What Nehru said is definitely there. We have to be leaders in generating intellectual property (IP). How long can the country depend on foreign IP? Already, IITs have made a beginning. IIT-H also has a lot of R&D projects. And of course, we need to meet the manpower needs of the economy. There is so much demand for technical manpower in India. That’s the reason why we are talking about 20,000 students. We will also look at starting a research and incubation park. On this, we are talking to industrialists in Hyderabad and their response has been positive.
Are you looking at any specific industrial sector?
Initially, we may look at sectors which require a little less investment, but we will be looking broadly at all sectors. We are interacting with Dr Reddy’s Labs on drug delivery systems and also discussing a Pratt & Whitney project with Infotech Enterprises. Basically, what we are looking at is joint research activities. In some cases, we may also have a joint training programme through short-term courses.
There was a debate recently on the quality of faculties at IITs...
It’s partly true. We are doing research, but we have a long way to go. Today, our research output is at high levels, but we should be cognizant of the fact that we are not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We want to be like MIT, but it will take some time. I would emphasise on looking at the value of our research papers today and look at where we were 20 years ago. There has been a seven- to eight-fold jump in research papers. MIT has a much longer history, whereas the whole IIT system has been around for 50-plus years. And, research has been emphasised at IITs only in the last 20 years.