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Ripped from the headlines
New mysteries are lifting their plots out of the newspapers. And that's not a bad thing.
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Ivory Tower
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[12/02/99]

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"You find IIT graduates all over the place. Sometimes you get a feeling that it's someone from IIT by default and that all you have to do is ask what IIT they are from. Their success rate, if you chart it, looks like a hockey stick," says Yogesh Sharma, the editor of siliconvalleyindia magazine.

Pavan Nigam, IIT graduate and chief technology officer of Healtheon, agrees: "Anybody who makes it into an IIT, you are now set for life. You might end up in the bottom five percent of your class but you are still set for life."

How have IIT graduates come to represent such an economic and entrepreneurial juggernaut? Educated in English and ready to travel at the drop of a hat, IIT grads embody all the ideals of the new economy: They are flexible and brilliant technological knowledge workers who easily cross borders and cultures to pursue their entrepreneurial and employment dreams.

Founded in the 1940s, IIT was the brainchild of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who sought to create a techno-elite to build dams, highways and bridges for the freshly minted nation. Modeled as a bigger, publicly-funded Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the IIT system consists of six campuses located in Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Bombay (renamed Mumbai), Madras (renamed Chennai) and Guwahati.

About 2,000 undergraduates enroll each year, as well as a handful of graduate students. The Indian government subsidizes 75 percent of the approximately $3,000 expended on each student's tuition, room and board. Before 1993, IIT students paid less than $200 per year for room, board and tuition. Declining subsidies since then have translated into steadily rising tuition. But an IIT degree remains a world-class educational bargain.

Yet the very success of IIT's educational system has bred controversy. As more and more IIT grads leave their homeland for the United States, the brain drain out of India has turned to a virtual hemorrhage. Radicals in India have suggested the government should privatize the IIT system rather than continue to subsidize the education of fair-weather patriots. Other critics claim the IIT system does little to engender a sense of responsibility that might sway wealthy grads to do more than send fat checks back to India.

"The IIT education makes you a very technically literate person," says Supratik Chakraborty, an IIT Kharagpur graduate. "But there is this other part of education -- how you contribute to your society. It's not always in terms of money but in terms of services or participation in the community at large."

But the IIT system churns out engineers and not priests or social workers. And most IIT grads revel in their quest for cash. "To me, creating wealth is a noble activity. I don't consider this to be a trivial or cheap thing to do," says Kanwal Rekhi, an IIT Bombay graduate who sold his company ExceLan to software giant Novell for $200 million and now often backs companies started by younger IIT graduates. Rekhi's refrain represents a kind of mantra among IIT grads who have begun to give India the economic power (and, by extension, political power) that eluded decades of carefully planned development.

Yet only the top 1 percent of applicants have the chance to experience an IIT education. Such odds make the most prestigious U.S. school pale in comparison. Harvard, for instance, has a 13-percent acceptance rate. And unlike American colleges, admission to IIT almost solely depends on three brutal exams covering physics, chemistry and mathematics. Most questions on those exams would thoroughly flummox the vast majority of U.S. college students, let alone top-notch U.S. high school students. "I still have a copy of the mathematics exam. But I couldn't explain the math questions in English," says Ramesh Parameswaran, a graduate of IIT Bombay who went on to work at Microsoft and then co-founded an Internet business called XpertSite.com.

To prepare for this braincrusher, some applicants start studying two years in advance when they are 14 or 15 years old. They may log three, four, five or even 10 hours per day, seven days a week, to hone their skills. Some wait to take the exam until after they have graduated from high school and have time to study. But the majority study for high school graduation and the IIT exam simultaneously, giving new meaning to the term sleep deprivation. "I spent a year doing that, studying, for both end of high school and IIT. I don't much remember doing anything else that year," says Parameswaran.

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