The IITs’ expansion beyond engineering must continue

In August, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras became the latest IIT to announce that it was expanding further beyond its original engineering-focused remit.

In 2023, the university opened a Department of Medical Sciences and Technology, focused on combining engineering, biology and healthcare technology. Now it intends to build a teaching hospital on its Chennai campus and offer medical degrees, subject to regulatory approval.

Writing about the initiative, R. Krishna Kumar, a professor there, noted that “institutions that helped transform India must now have the courage to transform themselves”. But IIT Madras is far from unique among the 23 IITs in having already set out on a path towards becoming larger, multidisciplinary institutions.

The expansion into medicine started with IIT-Kharagpur launching a School of Medical Science and Technology in 2001. After more than two decades of delay, due to bureaucratic and other hurdles, it plans to offer medical degrees soon.

Then, in 2022, IIT-Kanpur set up The Gangwal School of Medical Sciences and Technology, funded by alumnus Rakesh Gangwal, co-founder of Indigo Airlines. The school is slated to open next May, initially offering specialist higher medical degrees before, it hopes, receiving approval to issue general medical degrees from towards the end of the decade.

The IITs are venturing into other STEM fields, too – often thanks to generous funding from alumni and well-wishers. For example, IIT-Madras launched the Wadhwani School of Data Science and AI in 2024 with financial support from its alumnus Sunil Wadhwani, an Indian-American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. And the Bhupat & Jyoti Mehta Family Foundation, set up by Indian-American entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Rahul Mehta, has over the years supported several new multidisciplinary programmes across as many as eight IITs.

Expansion into non-STEM fields is also occurring. IIT Kharagpur launched an MBA as early as 1993, after alumnus Vinod Gupta bankrolled the establishment of the Vinod Gupta School of Management. Two years later, IIT Bombay started its own MBA programme, later naming its management school after Shailesh J. Mehta, the Indian-American alumnus and venture capitalist who funded it.

Today, several IITs offer undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in non-STEM fields, and 2020’s new National Education Policy (NEP) urged even specialist institutions to embrace a more multidisciplinary, liberal arts approach that includes the arts and humanities.

The IITs have also begun responding to the NEP’s call for India’s best public universities to set up overseas campuses.

IIT Madras was first off the mark, setting up a branch campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 2023. The following year, IIT Delhi established one in Abu Dhabi. Both are so far admitting only a small number of students in select courses, and it will be a while before they become larger campuses. But the precedent is set.

Indeed, IIT Bombay has even felt bold enough to enter the crowded US higher education market, announcing a New York campus earlier this year, in collaboration with SUNY Old Westbury.

The private university BITS Pilani established an overseas campus in Dubai as early as 2000, primarily to cater to the growing numbers of expatriate Indians in the region. However, the thinking behind the NEP’s push for top public universities to follow suit is that their brands will be able to attract both expatriate Indians and locals.

The third major change that has come about at the IITs is a transformation from their earlier identity as teaching institutions to teaching-cum-research institutions. This shift began in earnest after world university rankings – which are mostly informed by research-related metrics – started to become popular from the early 2000s.

The IITs’ poor performance in these was frequently lamented by senior Indian government officials. For example, in 2008, prime minister Manmohan Singh called for reviving “the tradition of doing good research along with good teaching”. In 2011, then environment minister and IIT alumnus Jairam Ramesh kicked off a storm when he claimed there was “hardly any worthwhile research from our IITs”. President Pranab Mukherjee, too, repeatedly drew attention to the low rankings of the IITs and other universities and called for improvements in research. The IITs took heed – although most still languish in world rankings.

Some observers are sceptical of these expansions on the IITs’ original focus on the domestic training of engineers. For example, Vasu Eda, founding director of the August 15, 2047 Project, asserts that an “educational institution’s greatest asset is not its ability to enter every important field…but to build exceptional depth in a few capabilities over decades”.

But he also notes that stripping away the humanities from IITs, which some advocates call for, “moves the institutes away from every [global] model that reliably produces researchers, and against the government’s own education policy”.

Regarding overseas branch campuses, international higher education expert Philip Altbach has expressed concern about overexpansion and overcommitment since many of the newer IITs still fall short in terms of faculty, students and infrastructure.

Eda sees the root of the problem as that India “has not said what it wants” from the IITs – “and the IITs have not decided for themselves either”. For instance, “Before asking why the IITs do not produce more researchers, India might ask whether it has ever told them that it wants them to, and whether it is willing to wait for the answer, because a culture of inquiry is among the things a country can only choose to patiently build.”

It is certainly notable that at least some – or perhaps most – of the stimulus for IIT expansion into new disciplines, research and other countries appears to have come from outside, whether from donors or the government. This is not surprising. Institutions of all kinds, including universities, are stubbornly resistant to change.

The problem is that ad hoc expansion, driven mainly by the will and wealth of individuals, sits uneasily with what is supposed to be a coherent and globally renowned brand. But the NEP points the way towards a more consistent expansion that will increase the impact of the IITs – rightly listed by Eda as being among “independent India’s great institutional achievements”.

Pushkar is director of the International Centre Goa.