IIIT-Hyderabad to focus on research

Consider this: In the field of computer science, electronics and communications and related subjects, the US produces 600 PhDs every year.

In contrast, China's doctoral output in related subjects is a mind-boggling 3,000. And India's annual output in these disciplines is 75 or even less.

All the universities in the country, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), NITs and CSIR laboratories together produce only this much. As part of an effort to bridge this gap between the PhD-holder pools of India and countries like the US and China, the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad, proposes to produce about 100 PhDs by 2012 against 15 today.

At the outset, the goal of the institution was to get into research in a big way to meet the needs of the industry or society. To develop technology, it is necessary to have a very strong PhD programme, says Rajiv Sangal, director, IIIT.

Sangal, who was in Kanpur for the national symposium on intellectual property rights at IIT-Kanpur, told Business Standard, "We are also working on building an eminent faculty whose work would be oriented towards helping the industry and society rather than research, which is merely good for paper publication."

To achieve these goals, the formula which the institution has evolved is to convert an undergraduate programme into a research programme.

General technology institutions, including IITs, do not get good PhD students. Therefore, the faculty in these institutions have to rely on MTech students for research. The tenure of the latter is only of a year.

Thus, there is a regular stream of students taking up research, but for only a year. The result is that no large group of researchers is formed at these institutions.

"Our institute is only five years old and we have the largest group of researchers in our field in the country," claimed Sangal.

"At the under-graduate level, we give a degree called BTech (Hons).We were told that not one student will opt for it. But when it started we got 30 students out of 100 who opted for research.

"They are introduced to their area of research in the second semester of second year. Once they have completed their BTech, they have already done two-and-a-half years of research in that subject. It is these students who go on to develop technology," he said.

"In this manner, we already have three research groups on language technology, computer science, and data engineering. Those who got introduced to research at the under-graduate level are going into higher studies; 15 of the 30 are going for higher studies at the institute itself," Sangal added.

There are three interdisciplinary areas in which the institution provided courses. These are computer science, electronics and communications. Besides, there is computer-aided structural engineering, bio-informatics and computational linguistics.

As for funding of the institution, initial infrastructure was provided by the government of Andhra Pradesh and the rest was managed through government aid, research consultancy and user agencies, he explained.