The familiar TOP-N university list and our declining educational institutions

Everytime a top-N university list comes out, Indian Technical universities and institutions find themselves increasingly out of that list, with US and other western developed countries dominating and China showing a big improvement. This is followed by series of self-denial arguments on how these surveys did not consider X or Y factors, how they are flawed and we don't care and so on. Or just more despair and rage against UPA government. Yet we cannot run away from the question that "Are the standard of our Universities continuously going down?".

IMO, it is not that our standards are declining absolutely. What is happening is that others are improving at such a rate that we are unable to keep up and are relatively falling behind. That's why our universities are slowly moving out of the TOP-N lists.

Science is sheer will of man to explain the unknown and the still unreasonable phenomenon (and needs support and funds long term without demanding results), while technology is the use of acquired scientific knowledge for the benefit of mankind by developing products. In my opinion there is a dependency between technology related educational institutions and the local industry. The two rarely develop or excel in isolation. In California, Texas and Massachusetts areas of US, we have strongest technology companies and world's best universities, In Beijing the same story and so in Israel. How about India ?

Our Industry is services based largely applying technology and not developing it. How then we expect our universities to excel in Technology ? Why would an industry in other country collaborate with our university ? How would our university develop technology or do pioneering research when there are no takers for it and nobody challenging them to do it. I think IITs were primarily started with the objective of teaching and manpower creation (which was 100% right at that time to meet the demands of our service Industry). We have therefore traditionally lagged in research and today there seems to be little motivation for research as industry does not demand or need it. Our top universities have produced excellent talent for American Universities and MNCs (demonstrated by how many Indians have excelled academically and professionally in US) and we serve largely as feeder institutions to these great companies and universities in the west. Perhaps it the reason as to why

(1) Most top talent from IIT/IISC students go abroad for work or higher education rather than the IIT students being dishonest or unpatriotic to the country as is the case made out by many here.

(2) It is difficult to hire top talent to serve as Professors in our leading technical institutions (IIT & IISC). The research oriented find it more rewarding (work-wise and money wise) to serve western Institutions.

(3) Our research output is low (both quality & quantity) and primarily adding on existing work done in the west rather than path breaking, the number of PhDs enrolling is very few, the funds for research are less and so on.

We are caught in a vicious self-effacing cycle.

China is doing things right, Their industry is moving from contract hardware manufacturing to products in a big way. Their educational priority is also moving from entry level education to producing researchers who can solve complex problems faced by the their industry while trying to move up the value chain. Their universities have now a very big faculty (including expats and western educated Chinese scholars), the government is giving attracting compensation packages, both industry and government are providing motivation & funds for research and in such an environment its no big deal that many chinese universities have resolved to break into the world's ivy league in a few years time. They are increasingly adopting western practices like tenured professorship, research contribution to leading journals, joint research and collaboration with western universities and so on. 

And that's why the chinese are moving up and into while we are moving down & out of the TOP-N lists …

This is the right time to bring "swadeshi" back. The government of the day (UPA or NDA or 3rd Party Alliance) must lay focus on this and be an enabler for this environment. The modern "Swadeshi" does not mean boycotting "Videshi" but increasingly laying focus on making our own, maturing them along side "Videshi" ones. Ultimately using our own "Swadeshi". The government should give tax breaks to product companies of their product related revenues, increase compensation for IIT/IISC faculty to western levels and give them the direction to support industry & focus on research)