Bengaluru’s advantages will give students an edge

Arun Jaitley has announced in his budget that an IIT has been sanctioned for Karnataka. 'IIT Bengaluru' sounds like a sweet proposition, given that the city will probably be one of the few, if not the only city, in the country to potentially have an IIM and an IIT together. While there is good reason to help development of other parts of the state by having an IIT in a smaller town, there could be multiple benefits in having it in Bengaluru. For one, the industry-academia interaction across multiple engineering disciplines including computer science (a large number of software product and services companies), electronics (chip manufacturing firms), mechanical (auto manufacturing in Hosur), aerospace (HAL) and civil (real estate) will be stronger and more fruitful. During my undergrad years in IIT Madras, strong industry affiliation in Chennai helped me anchor an extremely useful final-year project with the National Institute of Ocean Technology. Students will have a variety of options to do real-life assignments, and jobs and companies have great access to a talent pool and engineering knowhow on a real-time basis. I have seen many of my peers in IIT-Madras benefit from exciting real-time assignments in big companies in Chennai. Now, sitting on the other side of the table and trying to recruit engineers at Urban Ladder, I feel a paucity of good colleges which makes the job difficult and an institute like IIT Bengaluru would certainly help startups like ours recruit faster and better, and interact with engineers well ahead of the actual process in the form of internships. Last but not the least, students will enjoy life more in the city -- and it could give the new IIT a great chance at getting in the best of the talent, post the JEE! A student develops on multiple fronts during those formative years, and I've seen many of my friends at IITM develop their confidence and organization skills by managing big cultural fests and sports events with multiple sponsors and footfalls -- all of which will be a lot easier to anchor in a bigger city. One of the biggest challenges for the newer IITs has been to build a credible brand, as compared to the older ones such as IIT Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Kanpur etc. Given the above advantages and Bengaluru having developed into a hub of the digital world in India, IIT Bengaluru could achieve on-par status much sooner, and could thus pave the way for a lot more newer IITs and IIMs in other bigger cities too. -TOI