December 05, 2011

Juggling Numbers - Breeding Education?

During some of my free time, a couple of weeks ago, I happened to read about the recent additions to the most prestigious technical and business schools in India - the IITs and IIMs respectively. What baffled me though, was the long list of juggling numbers. What used to be 7 and 6 earlier, was now 16 and 13! The newbies being,

IIM Shillong, Meghalaya
IIM Ranchi, Jharkhand
IIM Rohtak, Haryana
IIM Raipur, Chhattisgarh
IIM Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu
IIM Udaipur, Rajasthan
IIM Kashipur, Uttarakhand

IIT Ropar, Punjab
IIT Bhubaneswar, Orissa
IIT Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh
IIT Gandhinagar, Gujarat
IIT Patna, Bihar
IIT Jodhpur, Rajasthan
IIT Mandi, Himachal Pradesh
IIT Indore, Madhya Pradesh
IIT (BHU) Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

This takes the total count of IITs and IIMs to 16 and 13 respectively. This initiative from the Eleventh Five Year Plan, may help in churning out more number of graduates, but the catch here is whether this number can match in quality - something these institutes are famous for. Ironically, IIM Ranchi has the highest CAT cut-off percentage at 99.66. Students gaining admissions to the new % of seats may not be the best breed but could yet prove better than the thousands of graduates coming from the lower tier institutes across the country.