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Take, for example, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) in India. All of them were built in a single five-year plan. The question is not whether the goal is impossible, but the real question is to develop the capability to start building not 5 IITs but around 100 institutes across the Asian continent of the Capability of the IITs.
We have to harness the capability of the IIT-like institutes to build institutes of advanced learning in the arts and the sciences into single monoliths.

The Current Scenario: The investment in the field of Research and Development in India has yet to catch up since the Narasimha Rao’s regime when he slashed the research funding. Since then the funding research increased after the BJP came into power. But research had already become outdated and has only 120 scientists employed in R&D per million compared to China’s 633. The number of research papers has also decreased - where it was once above 15,000 papers in 1980s, it has dropped in the last 20 years to 13,000. Similarly, the number of PhDs in engineering has also dropped and does not cross even 500, while the number of Chinese has long since crossed the 3,000 mark.

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* Contributed by -
Raamakrishnan M. & Aparna Renganathan,
PGP1 Students,
BIM, Trichy,
Published in KRIYA, February 2006 Issue, the monthly magazine of the institute.