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Why have so many Indian engineers succeeded around the world? The Indian Institutes of Technology may be one answer.

By SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
September 27, 2004; Page R7

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KANPUR, INDIA -- "Welcome to the Machine," Pink Floyd's rock anthem, blares from a dormitory on the 1,055-acre Indian Institute of Technology campus here.

The song could well be the anthem of the school, and of the six other IITs in India that are churning out top-notch engineers with a regularity that thrills corporations around the world. The government-sponsored institutes are considered among the most demanding engineering schools anywhere, and their alumni can be found in top executive positions in companies around the world.

Rajat Gupta, former managing director of McKinsey & Co.; Arun Sarin, chief executive of Vodafone Group PLC; Victor Menezes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup Inc.; Kanwal Rekhi, venture capitalist and founder of Excelan Inc.; Rono Dutta, former president of UAL Corp.'s United Airlines; Rakesh Gangwal, former chief executive of US Airways; and Vinod Khosla, partner in Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers and co-founder of Sun Microsystems Inc. -- all are graduates of India's IITs.

Global Presence

Such success is the reason IIT graduates have such a high profile globally. "The brand is, by now, so well established that in the future, too, IIT graduates will continue to be very successful. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Nandan Nilekani, chief executive officer of the Indian software-services company Infosys Technolgies Ltd. and a 1978 IIT Bombay graduate. At present, about 25,000 IIT graduates are working in the U.S., according to the Economic Times, an Indian financial newspaper. Over the years, Cisco Systems Inc., in San Jose, Calif., says it has hired more than 1,000 for its operations, and the director of a major U.S. research firm says the IITs are one of its most important sources of research talent, both in the U.S. and in Asia.

In the past, IITs graduated an average total of 2,500 engineers each year. But an increase in space of about 2,000 students over the past few years means that if all the students admitted in 2004 graduate -- 95% usually do -- the world will be nearly 4,500 IIT engineers richer in 2008. If that number seems large, consider this: In 2004, 175,000 aspirants took the Joint Entrance Examination, or JEE, which governs admission to the IITs. Only 2.6% of those were admitted, and it's not uncommon for Indian applicants to fail to get into the IITs but win admission to top U.S. engineering colleges.

Tough Test

"The JEE is the toughest undergraduate entrance exam of its kind in the world, and it acts as a guillotine at the IITs' entrance," says Sandipan Deb, author of "The IITians" and a graduate of IIT Kharagpur. "So what you get are extremely high-quality engineers."

Ramanan Raghavendran, managing director at TH Lee Putnam Ventures, a New York private-equity firm, says: "For a technology company looking to quickly find 100 engineers, there really is only one place in the world to do it: India. There are just more engineers there than in the U.S." And these engineers are actually contributing to the long-term success of the U.S. economy, he says, because of the needed talent they provide.

Best of the Best

"What you have at the end of the IIT filtering process, followed by the further filter of those who 'make it' to the U.S., is the crème de la crème of Indian engineers," says Mr. Raghavendran. "If you applied a similar filter in the U.S. -- find the best engineers from the top 10 engineering programs in the U.S. -- you'd find an equally brilliant and qualified group of people."

...

Engineering, Always

But unlike engineering schools in the U.S., which often offer courses in the arts and humanities, the IITs focus on technical education and engineering basics to the exclusion of nearly everything else. So, while the number of credits or the course load might be the same as that in a U.S. program, the nature of the course load at an IIT is engineering, engineering and more engineering.

...

R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, a diversified group of companies in India, and an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, who has studied the "IIT brand," says that increasingly, even engineers from other Indian universities now do their master's degrees at the IITs. The result: more IIT-trained engineers.

"There is no doubt that we will only do better in the world," says IIT Kanpur's Mr. Dhande. "Our graph is always going up." But he is far from complacent. He believes the IITs need to focus more on research and enhance the nontechnical, creative skills of their graduates. "In the next 25 years, it is people with creative talent that will have more opportunities," he says.

Mr. Raghavendran couldn't agree more. "The IITs need to turn out better-rounded graduates," he says, "not just better engineers."

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