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Can India sell itself globally as a competitive source of quality education? You never know.
"Quite simply," says Sandipan Deb, IIT-ian author of The IITians, "the Indian Institutes of Technology are the biggest and most successful experiment in higher education in the developing world. There is not a single engineering school anywhere that is more difficult to get into. Only about one in a hundred applicants is allowed to enter the portals of the IITs. Harvard takes one in eight applicants." The rise of the IITs as a source of global brainpower is among the most fascinating stories of recent educational history---worldwide. You can't grab lunch at any of Silicon Valley's techie cafeterias without running into IITians (yeah, in plural). But the fascinating part, actually, is not that the nissle-granule concentrations in their crania are doing such an awfully good job generating business value---anyone onto ol' Nehru's 'scientific temper', and boy a temper it was, could've safely predicted that---but the monetary investment that went into it. The comparisons are staggering. An undergraduate student at IIT-Mumbai pays an annual fee of around Rs 40,000 to have himself (mostly so, so far) educated here, while his counterpart attending an American Ivy League college pays well above $30,000. Inhale... and think about it. It's that's not the most awesome story of competitive advantage, a lifetime's supply of Mood Indigo rock CD-burns to anyone who can tell us what is. And now the UK is getting ready to up its tuition fees for higher education---with some Britons threatening to pack their kids off to India for an education if the subsidies go. Of course, subsidies. That's the first thing that'll be flung at you when you talk about Rs 40,000 being competitive. Okay, okay, we all know that the real 'cost' of the IIT education is a lot higher --- an estimated Rs 1.25 lakh per annum at the undergrad level. But convert it to dollars, and its still Starbucks money (well okay, throw in the other forms of sustenance as well) to a student at Harvard or Yale. Given the true global market value of the education, any Indian bank in half its mind would offer a fee-covering loan to anyone who cracks the IIT entrance test (it goes without saying that the regressive suggestion of lowering the fees still further should be dismissed without further ado). No matter how you slice and dice the system for analysis, India has demonstrated a capacity for throwing up whizkids at a fraction of what it costs anywhere else. The only thing is that education is too much of a non-commercial project---speak to a few idealistic profs and you'll get what we mean---to think of as some sort of money-grubbing business... a corporation flailing its arms around to attract the best brains of the world (and their fees) to educate. Now who'd want to drag himself into this mess... ... unless, unless it makes serious sense as an opportunity. As a phenomenon that goes with the rest of the 'services hub of the world' story that's making people from Caracas to Cardoba pay more attention to India. Of course, the IITs are just an example to illustrate the country's education edge. It could be any institution that's got what it takes. Let's modify that a bit. Any institution that's willing to go the whole hog with what it takes. And that includes getting market-savvy. To begin with, take a good hard look at the insignias of the world's top education brands, and think of these as primary conveyors of what these hallowed self-perpetuating institutions are about (or claim to be about, if you like). Arguably the No 1 brand, Harvard, has a neat inverted-portal-shaped crest featuring a crimson band with 'Veritas' inscribed prominently across three open books ('Ve', 'Ri' and 'Tas'). That's Latin for 'Truth'. And according to some pow-wow club called the Veritas Forum, the original idea all those centuries ago was to take an inter-disciplinary intellectual approach to, well, truth---particularly in matters such as those dealt with by the recent Christmas issue of The Economist (so it must still hold market relevance in some way). The current occupant of the US White House, by the way, got his crimson credentials through an MBA at the top brand's B-school. He got his graduate credentials through a brand that has a motto that's rather similar--- Yale, with 'Lux Et Veritas'. That's 'Light and Truth'. Stanford, that West coast techie favourite, by the way, bears a German crest: 'Die Luft Der Freiheit Weht'. Translated, that's 'The Wind of Freedom Blows'. Oxford, that trans-Atlantic brand of English eminence, has 'Dominus Illuminatiu Mea'---'Lord Is My Light'. It is, of course, a much much older institution, even if people say the fun really began only in 1650 or so, when Jacob's café came in from the East to turn everybody's heads inside out. What do the IITs stand for? Each institute, it turns out, has a separate motto. IIT-Mumbai, for instance, has 'Gyanam Paramam Dheyam', which is Sanskrit for 'Knowledge is the Supreme Goal'. Then, there's IIT-Kharagpur, with 'Yoga Karmasu Koushalam', which means 'Purposeful Action Leads To Well-Being'. For the purpose of global market impact, a single motto for the compound brand IIT might be a better idea (IIT-Mumbai's, perhaps, or maybe a variation of India's own optimistic 'Satyamev Jayate', which means 'Truth Shall Prevail'). At the end, of course, brand identity is not all there is to success. No sir, no way. The institution, above all, must remain true to its projected identity---even if it means a fierce resistance to contortion. This, this nerve to put one's foot down when it counts, as Nehru observed of Romain Rolland's attitude to truth, could make the real difference.
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