MHRD wishes all IITians a "Happy" Engineers' Day

Yesterday was engineers' day, the birthday of Visvesvaraya, often cited as India's first engineer. And yesterday, a memory came back to my mind. It was 26th December last year. Alumni Day at IITB. My 25 years' ago's wingie saying: I am proud to say, "I am one of the very few of our batch who has still stuck to engineering and not moved over to the management side." He had his own manufacturing factory. He was creating jobs for people, jobs for India and producing goods, in effect, for the world, in this era of globalisation (soon to be glocalisation, will be explained in another post.) That year, that batch of silver jubilee alumni raised a sum total of donations amounting to over one crore. This particular (ex)^25 wingie of mine said that he was proud to be giving back to the institute. He had finished his 5 years (At that time it was a 5 year B. Tech.) in a meager six hundred Rupees. He also recalled that the batch size was about 200 students with vague departments like EP still non-existent.

As regular followers of my blog might know from here, I look at everything from a math perspective. So lets do the math. One crore by 200 is about fifty thousand per person assuming everyone contributed equally. That's about 5000 times more that wht they had investd initially! Also, if you assume that India's economy and the value of money has grown about 100 times (HUGE approximation), these guys are paying back 50 times their investment! Even if you assume that the govermnet invested 10k per student at that time, it still amounts to quintuplying that very investment! And this is especially significant when we've had times in the past when the income tax rates have been as high as 60% if not higher. Phew, which savings scheme gives that kind of returns?!?

Anyways, moving on to what I really want to talk about: I was shocked to read this article. It says that the government today invests 6-8 lakhs per IIT B.Tech student (haha. Scope with a capital S) and that it will soon be recovered from us. The means of doing so is to grant a "Demat degree" which tells the employer to pay money to the insti rather that the individual. This is exempt only to those who go for higher studies "in insti/India" or to students belonging to the reserved classes. Now, I have nothing against reservation, it was there since before, and will stick around for some time, but I would suggest people go and watch the movie Aarakshan. No wait, don't watch it, it's a pathetic movie. Flawed that the movie is and the fact that it hardly has anything related to reservations, it does point out that we should concentrate more on primary education to develop backward classes rather than suddenly giving loads of concession at the higher education level. Moreover, the article and hence the logic of the "Honorable" MHRD is highly flawed.

Also talking in terms of people going for higher studies, those who pursue a management degree will conveniently hide under "higher eduction". Also, not to be neglected is the legion of students going abroad for MS and PhD many a times unfunded, taking loans to the tune of 25-30 lakhs. Moreover, these guys have to submit their degrees to the universities. Imagine how it would look when it appears that these students have not yet paid their dues in their UG degree. How can they be expected to pay up during grad school?

On IITians being in great demand

I ask honorable Mr. Sibal, what great demand are you talking about? I sincerely think that IITs are piggybacking on past glories. If you consider what your ministry did in the past four years, increasing the number of seats without a proportionate increase in infrastructure and the rampant increase in the number of IITs which will surely lead to dilution of quality, I highly doubt that we will be in that much "demand" in the future. Moreover, the hard reality in our passing out Mechanical batch is that half the students have no clue of refrigeration of air-conditioning or of IC Engines or of Machine Design even.

Also, please do not be fooled by the highest salary that is quoted by random newspapers. The 60-lakh-a-year earning people work on oil-rigs off the coast of Nigeria and the one crore-ish Facebook offer is a one in a million case. The ground reality is that the average salary on the base level is not more that 4 lakhs. now take this hypothetical average person with a young sister at home to be married and a very old dad who works on a meagre pension. (Yes, general category students also suffer from these difficulties. Look at Three idiots for better picturisation.) Lets say he spends 2 lakhs a year in rent, deposits, LIC, PETROL (wtf, you increased prices by pi!) etc. Puts in 1.5 lakhs into his sister's marriage fund and is left with 50k. What will his savings amount to at the end of the day if you take that away from him too? And this is only the hypothetical average guy I'm talking about. What about those who get paid lesser? And what about those guys who don't get a job on campus at all? (Yes, such people also exist)

On Expenditure

You say, "honorable" minister, that the government spends 6-8 lakhs per B.Tech students. But we do not see that much money coming in. The staff that you hire to handle all the bureaucratic work in the acad office are a bunch of procrastinating individuals with whom you have to follow up a lot to get some transcripts! Also, while calculating, you might have done a sigma over all students and then divided it by the number of B.Techs. Also, we are not at all satisfied with our departments (Except perhaps EP or aero) - where professors ask you to make blowers instead of competing in racecar competitions. Also, I request that you do not count the concession that IITB gives festivals like MI and TF that it lends its rooms for events at half/30% of the price. Hardly anyone other than some 22 odd managers and some 75 off wannabe managers and freshies who simply like donkey work actually enjoys these festivals. If stopping concessions to these festivals will reduce the burden on the establishment, has that avenue been explored?

On a much more serious note, have you taken into account the money that the ministers from your government embezzle in frauds and scams? Please do not impose those scams on IITians. It is like you are making us pay for those scams while the guilty people go free after perhaps a few months in jail. Why not divert that money to help us out? Moreover, I have a serious doubt that out of the 6-8 lakhs which is sanctioned by the government, about 2-3 lakhs might not even see the light of day and go directly into the pockets of the higher ups.

Moreover, there is talk of scrapping JEE citing that there are a total of 150 Engg entrance exams and we need to cut it down to one. One question I'd like to ask here is that then it will be a hit-and-you-miss chance that some deserving student might not get IITs or NITs even. I didn't go and give all 150 entrance tests just because they existed. I knew my limits and applied only to those where I thought there was a chance. Please do not stop JEE. You will have no benchmarking standard. The people with lowest ranks in IIT get negative scores in JEE. Now simply think about what the average engineer would score in a One-exam-fits-all scenario.

On IITians contributing to Society

There's also news that consultants from E&Y helped the government in deciding to implement this step. I have a feeling that it would have been done in the purest of all sarkari manners: 3 tenders invited, McK and BCG quoted high, only E&Y could fit their pocket. I doubt they might have take into account how much we pay back to the society. I work in the healthcare sector and the products I design touch hundreds of lives even in the remotest of government hospitals. We go out and create jobs that add value. And in spite of this, we try to repay our debt as alumni, atleast once - 25 years down the line - to the prestigeous campus we proudly call alma mater.

I forsee that this decision will have a horrible impact on alumni donations. Think about it - Why would I want to pay back if you subject me to heavy financial burdens in the very days that I start earning?