The host, Reilly, also made this explanation for the American audience: "The Indian Institute of Technology may be the most important institution that you are not familiar with. Its status in India is equivalent to comparing Harvard, MIT and Princeton. Canada’s status in the United States.” If you have watched the Indian movie "Three Idiots" with IIT as the background, you will have a deeper understanding of this institution's lofty status in India, its absolutely free academic atmosphere, its unique teaching methods and its talented students.

 

The root of the widespread favour of IITs in U.S. political and business circles comes from Silicon Valley. Nearly 200,000 Indian high-tech immigrants have become one of the most critical components of this "world computer," and most of them graduated from this institution. John, the former U.S. ambassador to India, once joked: This is an Indian colony called Silicon Valley. Among the 2,000 newly established I.T. companies in Silicon Valley, 40% were founded by Indians, and half of the founders were IIT alums. In January 2003, IIT graduates in Silicon Valley celebrated the 50th anniversary of their alma mater. Bill Gates gave a speech and praised: "IIT is a magical institution that changes the world. Because compared with Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, IIT is so incredibly young.”

 

 

Nehru has always made it clear that IIT is his magnificent dream. The founding Prime 

Minister of India, who received a British elite education in childhood and graduated from Cambridge University, hopes that IIT can cultivate world-class engineers and become a catalyst to reshape this dejected, mute and sinking country. 

 

More than fifty years later, Mridulla, a professor at the Center for Modern Indian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, commented in an exclusive interview with our reporter that Nehru was an almost crazy idealist who fought the country against stereotyped socialism. Bundle together. In order to quickly prove India's renaissance to the world, he launched some tall and unrealistic projects in a campaign-style, blindly pursuing "world-class". But we have to admit that IIT has become one of the few successful examples of the "Nehru-style legacy". It accidentally promoted this country to become a software powerhouse a few years later, with its scientific and technological strength ranking among the best in the world.

 

In recent years, the number of engineering graduates trained in India each year has reached 1 million, while the number in the United States or Europe is less than 100,000, and graduates from IITs have become the leaders. In the famous alum list provided by the school to this publication, we can see such a string of names and shining titles: Raja Gupta (former general manager of McKinsey & Company), Yumang Gupta (Oracle), One of the main founders), Victor Meliz (former vice chairman of Citigroup), Rakesh Gangewo (former president of American Airlines), Arun Sarin (CEO of Vodafone), Avi Manud (partner of Goldman Sachs), Arun Natwari (former president of Bell), etc.

 

 

The first campus of IIT was set on the ruins of a prison in a small town 120 kilometres away from Kolkata. Many democrats who actively participated in Gandhi's "non-violent non-cooperation movement" were detained here, and two of them were shot dead. Nehru emphasized that this prison symbolizes India's humiliating past. IIT itself is a huge monument that will bring light and glory to India, and talents are always the foundation of a strong country.

 

In a short period, IIT has formed a university alliance with seven campuses located in Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras, Mumbai, Guwahati and Lukri. In 2000, when "Asia Weekly" selected Asia's best institutes of technology, Indian Institutes of Technology accounted for "half of the top ten", with 5 of the seven campuses. In the 2006 Times Global University Rankings, the Indian Institute of Technology ranked among the top 50. Its engineering subjects ranked third in the world, second only to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley. The American "Business Week" calls IIT graduates "the hottest export product in India's history", and famous companies such as IBM, H.P., Oracle, Microsoft, and Cisco have set up special offices in IIT to recruit outstanding talents as quickly as possible.

 

In 1961, India enacted the "Indian Institute of Technology Act" as a national legislation. This law stipulates that no institution or individual is allowed to interfere with the independent governance of the Institute of Technology, and it is absolutely prohibited for the Institute of Technology to have any involvement with business. Indelaisan, former president of IIT Madras, said in detail that over the years, IIT's main financial source has come from the central government. Student tuition fees have remained at the level when the school was founded.

 

In the 1990s, schools recovered only 5% of education costs from tuition fees, and now it isn't very important. For a long time, the Indian government did not pay attention to higher education. The "Report on the Status of Higher Education", released 25 years ago, pointed out: "More than half of the schools can be called intellectual and social slums." Only when the current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came to power did things turn around; he was a scholar.

 

However, even during the most difficult era of India's economic crisis, the central government's generous support for polytechnics never stopped for a moment. Rohit, a professor at the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Mumbai, said that he really doesn’t know whether this is a tragedy or a blessing for the country. In the process of renaissance, India has been immersed in various difficulties that have made it difficult to move forward - including poverty, disease, laziness, disorder and superstition.

 

Current State of Students

 

Many times, the government desperately mobilizes the whole country to engage in this advanced game. It has indeed made IIT what it is today. Still, it cannot change the ignorance and low penetration rate of basic education that exists in India. The latter directly becomes a fetter for the country's progress. A few days later, on the campus of Delhi University, another famous university in India, several second-year students of the School of Humanities, Asif, Dawood and Samit, had a long chat with me. They complain that IIT is like a statue of a god being enshrined. No matter how many sentient beings in the world are trapped in water and fire, their golden bodies are always wiped spotless.

 

Polytechnic professor Indili Sang feels the same way. In a public interview, he sternly denounced that IIT is independent of the world and that the young students inside it are full of indifference to problems such as poverty and backwardness, corruption, political inefficiency, prevalent gender and caste discrimination, and intensified religious conflicts outside the walls of the institution. And from the moment they step out of this school, many people will immediately board a flight to the United States without looking back. A considerable number of them are teenagers who grew up in disadvantaged caste families who were oppressed. IIT is their safe haven and helicopter.

 

Polytechnic students do not deny this fact. During my interviews, Avik from Kolkata, Valentine from Mumbai, and their classmates all confirmed to me that the best choice after graduation is to go to MIT or Princeton for further studies and finally stay in Silicon Valley or enter the world of Wall Street. The American dream is the most resonant topic among these Indian elites and the driving force behind all struggles. The reasons are in order, "a prosperous material life, a fair, free, and just social environment, full of opportunities and hope."

 

Even Nilekani, one of the most famous alumni of the University of Bombay and a leader in the Indian I.T. industry, lamented: There is only one thing missing from such a perfect education, and that is concern and responsibility for one's own country.