New Delhi: Highlighting India’s need for trained manpower in every field of engineering with a system thinking approach, the Director of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, V. Kamakoti, in an interview to ThePrint said the country need not worry about what fancy computation companies like ChatGPT have to say. India, he added, has many other issues that need to be dealt with first.
“There are many more problems to solve in India than ChatGPT. There are two types of computations, one is the fancy computation and the other is computation for solving real world problems,” he said.
Kamakoti’s statement comes close on the heels of a comment made by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month during an interaction with Indian industry leaders where he said that it was hopeless for Indian companies to compete with them when it comes to artificial intelligence.
“Forget what others have to say,” said Kamakoti. “I am talking about what India truly needs. India today needs well trained manpower in every field of engineering with a system thinking. I have so many infrastructure projects, so many projects on avionics, so many projects on health and medical sciences. We have a lot to improve in the parameters of education. Our gross enrollment ratio needs to reach 50.”
The IIT Madras director said that they have instead identified areas in which new-age courses will find a more problem-solving application and aid India move ahead in its development trajectory.
He said, “We have identified courses in which India needs larger human capacity. If we need to assess the risk management of an organisation, we need data science. If we want to do preventive maintenance of an engine in a mechanical way, we need data science there. This is why we have identified data science as one course that the country needs and we have started a B.Sc course in data science with a massive outreach. We currently have over 19,000 Indians enrolled in this course.”
Kamakoti also spoke at length about how IITs are expanding their ambit of technical education in the technical field beyond Indian borders. The IIT campus in Tanzania, which will be an extension of the Madras campus, is set to be operational by October 2023. Speaking about it with ThePrint, he said, “There were three factors based on which Tanzania was selected as a location. The first was, they should need our help; second was, their government should support us; and the third, their basic education system should be strong.”
“The Tanzania campus will start functioning in October 2023. As a new campus, we want to do new and exciting things there. First and foremost, we are starting a course on data science there as well. We are expecting enrollment of about 200-300 students in this course. Identifying a global need for courses in cybersecurity, we are also starting an M.tech in cyber physical systems,” he said.
In order to equip the Tanzanian students with technical know-how and teaching expertise, they will also be invited to the IIT Madras campus to pursue PhDs. “We will encourage the local students to come to Madras to pursue their doctorate degrees so that they can go back and become teachers in the Tanzania campus.”
IIT Madras is also aiming to make the Tanzania campus “self-sustaining”.
He added that they are expecting massive industry participation and students from other African countries in the continent to enroll for higher education at the Tanzania campus.
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IITs support national accreditation endeavour
Professor Kamakoti also spoke about how IITs in the country were of the consensus that they should become a part of the centralised accreditation system of the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC).
Apart from the University Grants Commission (UGC), which grants recognition to institutions, there is NAAC, which does assessment and a graded accreditation of higher education institutions over five-year periods. Currently, the IITs conduct their own internal peer review, which does not involve any of these agencies.
In a meeting of the IIT Council — the governing body of all IITs — held in April, the topic of IITs becoming a part of the NAAC was discussed.
Speaking on this, Prof Kamakoti said, “The accreditation gives us a third-party review of our work and gives us a purview of what can be improved. So, one single accreditation for all technical departments in the country makes sense and is important. Which is why, everybody agrees that there is a need for this kind of single party accreditation system. However, IITs give greater autonomy to its departments, which is why the general accreditation process cannot come to an IIT.”
He said that since IITs have a different style of functioning than other universities, the parameters for accreditation for them will be different than what they are for other technical institutions in the country.
Focus on mental health
In his conversation with ThePrint, Kamakoti also addressed the recent spate of student suicides in IITs and spoke about the initiatives underway on campus. IIT Madras has witnessed five student suicides in the past seven months. He said that the campus in Chennai being “the most affected”, several mental health initiatives have been implemented at speed to address student concerns.
“There are four predominant reasons that we have identified through our student surveys — these include personal issues, health issues, competition and financial issues…. So, there is a need to equip our students with ways to cope with this stress.”
Stressing on how Covid amplified this stress and competition amongst peers, he said, “Prior to Covid, students could come together and learn from each other organically. But during the pandemic, students could not come to campus. When students returned, they discovered that some of their peers had taken extra value-added courses or acquired additional skills at home, which helped them secure internships. This realisation created a sense of being left behind and intensified the pressure on students.”
To help students to cope, the institute has now set up a portal called “Be Happy”, which encourages students to enroll for mental health counseling and arranges for student-professor interactions.
Speaking about this, the director said, “We have put many measures in place to address this issue and brought a time bound grievance-redressal mechanism. We now have listeners who will simply listen to students vent if they need it. There are structured ‘kushal meetings’ where students interact with faculty. We also now have an independent group of counsellors.”
(Edited by Zinnia Ray Chaudhuri)