NEWS
: Young IIT gurus drop dollar
dreams to teach
There
is some good news for
India
,
which has long been struggling with the problem of brain drain. The reputation
of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) coupled with
India
’s technology visibility is attracting talent back into the country. IIT
graduates are credited for their leadership role in establishing the booming
Indian tech industry.
At
least 35 of the new faculty recruited at IIT Delhi in the last two years have
abandoned their dollar dreams at the Silicon Laboratories in the
United States
and other countries to join the institute. What’s more, these are not cases
of ‘been there seen it all’ cynics but young teachers under 40!
Freedom
to work is the major reason why S Janardhanan, Assistant professor of electrical
engineering at IIT, left his job with
Nanyang Technological University
,
Singapore
. “No matter how good you are, you will always be a foreigner in a foreign
land,” says Janardhanan, an IIT Bombay graduate.
“Although
the facilities at NTU were excellent I was working under restrictions. Soon I
realized that working in my own country would be better as I would have more
freedom,” he says.
Anirban
Mahanti finds
India
an exciting place to do research. “After a PhD, the most obvious choice is a
research job,” he says. After a BE from Birla Institute of Technology-Mesra
and a PhD from University of Saskatchewan in Canada, Mahanti chose to teach
after a short stint as assistant professor at the University of Calgary in
Canada. The fact that his wife works as a doctor at AIIMS,
Delhi
only helped. After nearly a decade in US, he decided to come back.
“A
trend has begun to develop among people living in the
US
that they must come back. Things have changed. With a lot of industrialization
happening, a formidably critical mass of a research community is taking shape
here,” he says.
The
expansion of the IT industry has also attracted talented people. “There are no
barriers now. I can do the same work sitting in
India
or abroad,” says Niloy Mitra from Department of Computer Science and
Engineering. “There is also easy availability of funds for carrying out
research projects,” says the young assistant professor who can easily be
mistaken to be a student.
A
huge salary cut does not bother Mitra, who did his masters from
Stanford
University
and went on to get a PhD from
Technical
University
,
Vienna
.
“There
is a huge difference in salary. But we get research grant of up to Rs 25,000 a
month. And the teaching load is easier than in the West,” he says.
Others
had planned to come back to
India
all along. “I had planned to come back and teach at the IITs,” says
Assistant professor of Computer Science Amitabh Bagchi.
However,
a lot needs to be done to attract more young people to come to academics in
India
, feels Bagchi, a recipient of the Outstanding Young Faculty Fellowships at IIT
Delhi. “People in the West see IIT as a place with some good researchers. But
the research output is a major challenge facing IIT system. We need to be more
proactive about this,” says Bagchi, who was in Brooklyn Polytechnic,
New York
before coming back to
India
.
Courtesy
: mynews.in
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