The segment about the Indian Institutes of Technology will re-air on "60 Minutes" on Sunday, June 22nd. It is slated to be the second segment in the program - Lizzie Weinreb, Associate Producer, "60 Minutes", CBS News.
CBS News 60 Minutes /
Imported from India / January 12, 2003
Copyright CBS
Worldwide Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Prepared by Burrelle's Information Services.
... the smartest, most successful, most
influential Indians who've migrated to the US seem to share a common credential:
They're graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, better known as IIT.
Made up of seven campuses throughout India, IIT may be the most important
university you've never heard of ... This is IIT Bombay. Put Harvard, MIT and
Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in
India ... With a population of over a billion people in India, competition to
get into the IIT is ferocious. Last year, 178,000 high school seniors took the
entrance exam called the JEE. Just over 3,500 were accepted or less than 2
percent. Compare that with Harvard, say, which accepts about 10 percent of its
applicants ... impact of IIT graduates has been on the American technology
revolution ... "I can't imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven't
played a leading role "... It isn't just high tech ... Fortune 500 headhunters
are always on the lookout for that IIT degree ... And the American companies
love the kids from IIT ... Nehru, India's first prime minister, created IIT 50
years ago just after independence to train the scientists and engineers he knew
the nation would need to move from medieval to modern. He never imagined India
would be supplying brainpower to the whole world ...
INFOSYS CHAIRMAN MURTHY: ... my son ... wanted
to do computer science at IIT. To do computer science at IIT, you have to be in
the top 200 and he couldn't do that, so he went to Cornell instead.
STAHL: Think about that for a minute. A kid from India using an Ivy League
university as a safety school. That's how smart these guys are ...
MURTHY: ... Nehru wanted all these young men and women to contribute to the
success of India, and they are contributing to the success of India ... Some of
these people who have reached the higher echelons in the corporate world in the
US, you know, they have persuaded their corporations to start operations in
India, whether it's Texas Instruments, whether it's General Electric, whether
it's Citibank.
KHOSLA: I have no question that India now is benefiting significantly from the
cycling of knowledge, the back and forth, no question about it ... How many jobs
have entrepreneurs -- Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley created over the
last 15, 20 years? Hundreds of thousands, I would guess ... For this society,
here in America.