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Joshi chides IITians for brain-drain

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New Delhi, July 31

Underlining the ill-effects of brain-drain to a society, Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi on Wednesday urged the students of the many branches of Indian Institute of Technology to stop looking westwards in search of lucrative careers. "(You should) innovate to solve Indian problems," Joshi told them while appealing to them to be more research oriented. "B.Tech should not be the end," he told the students, adding: "We desire that the IITs must donate at least some percentage of their time, if not all, for research." Joshi stressed that he had full faith in the brilliance of young Indian genius and believed it could help solve the problems of India and, through it, of one-sixth of the whole world. He said India was being invited in the international market because of the low cost of its software. But the moment other countries also develop such software they would not need Indians. "So we need to develop hardware. Unless we do this, we will be controlled and will continue to depend on external markets," he said. "I wish more hardware research is done in India."

Urging them to to "try to lead others, not to be led," he told the students the country had reserved a lot of money in terms of fellowships for facilitating scientific research and the students just had to match international standards of excellence to avail them. He, however, observed that very few of these fellowships were being used by the students and cited the example of the Shyama Prasad Mookherjee fellowship, which can be given to 25 people but could actually be given to only five persons each in the past two years due to the lack of sufficient number of worthy candidates.

Regional Engineering Colleges being upgraded as IITs

Jaipur, April 25

The number of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITS) will go up to 14 soon with the upgradation of all seven Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs) as National Institutes of Technology, Union Human Resources minister Murli Manohar Joshi said today. Talking to newspersons here, Dr Joshi said the government was laying stress on technical education and to further boost ''our identity as a country imparting international level technical education.''

The government had already decided to upgrade all seven Regional Engineering Colleges to the level of IITs, doubling the number of IITs to 14, he said. Dr Joshi said the intake of students in all IITs also was being doubled. With the upgradation of RECs, the total intake in all 14 IITs would be around 10,000 per year. He said an emphasis was also being given to spread technical education to rural area through community polytechnics and to modernise equipment in technical education institutes. He said upcoming scientists were also being provided the opportunity to interact with Nobel Prize-winning scientists.

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