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Hoping to transform India
Alumni from the IIT will meet in December at PanIIT 2006 in Mumbai to work out solutions to India's problems, which include development issues, governance and methodology.
- By Rajendar Menen, Gulf News Reort
- Published: 00:00 November 23, 2006
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- IITians have contributed to several sectors of the Indian economy from rural development, academics and bureaucracy to politics.
Alumni from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), several of whom have migrated to greener pastures overseas, now believe it is payback time. They will meet at PanIIT 2006 in Mumbai in December to work out solutions to India's problems. President Kalam will inaugurate the event and Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh will address the gathering.
On the agenda are technological answers to development issues, ideas to professionalise governance and sharing methodology to encourage entrepreneurship and build global brands. PanIIT also plans to have a permanent secretariat in India to oversee their initiatives on nation building.
"We don't have an ecosystem of financing and encouraging young entrepreneurs. In India, the system is against you, but in the US the system does not prevent you from succeeding," points out Ashank Desai, Chairman, Mastek. "The idea of this meet is to inspire and involve the younger generation to come forward to contribute towards nation building."
The first PanIIT event at Silicon Valley in 2003 was attended by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. The second event, held at Delhi in 2004, was attended by President Kalam and it led to the formation of advanced computing and rural transformation initiatives. The third event was held in the US in 2005, the year the US administration honoured IITians for their contributions.
"We are keen on developing some catalysts among IITians. For instance, if someone is interested in solving water woes, he will attend the session on this and interact with people and chart out a course of action. Some IITians are already working on improving technical education In India. We have created a forum where people can network," adds Desai. "We also have a project where a group of IIT faculty is partnering with other colleges to improve the quality of education."
IITians have contributed to several sectors of the Indian economy from rural development, academics and bureaucracy to politics. "But in a knowledge economy," says Desai "there has to be knowledge generation, creation, preservation and dissemination to use it for the betterment of society. One of the initiatives will be to build broadband connectivity. For knowledge creation we should have research-oriented institutes. Knowledge Process Outsourcing (KPO) is coming up in a big way and so we need to build an industry to sustain KPO. We need to have strong Intellectual Property Rights to preserve our knowledge.
"We should have proper laws in place to conduct business. For dissemination, we need to have local content and ensure connectivity even in villages. We also need to collaborate with universities outside India to form knowledge networks. To become a knowledge economy we need to create good institutes with research and development facilities."
