ANISH DHOPESHWARKAR
In this year’s Monsoon Session of the Parliament, V Vijayasai Reddy, a Rajya Sabha MP from Andhra raised an interesting question with the Ministry of Human Resource Development, regarding the ‘dropouts’ from India’s premier education institutes- IITs. The reply which he received rasied many eyebrows in the world of academia.
A staggering 2461 students chose to drop out of IITs in last two years, and almost 50 percent of these were from IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kharagpur, followed by Bombay, Kanpur and Madras. For most of the aspirants, this came as a shock. Every year around million students apply for JEE, and there are just a few thousand seats, so why would anyone quit a seat for which one had wasted precious years of childhood and teenage?
The spokesperson of MHRD mentioned almost 60 percent of these dropouts are from PG/PhD seats not the undergraduate ones.
Along with JEE which is the entrance exam for its prestigious BTech. courses IITs also conduct GATE, which is the entrance for its MTech courses and also for other MSc/MTech like IISc etc. Along with admission for PG courses GATE also serves the purpose of recruiting engineering candidates for various PSU (ONGS, Railway, NTPC etc). So it is seen that the merit list of PG programs are declared very much in advance than the merit list of PSUs. So usually candidates who are waiting for PSU results just to be on the safer side secure admission into PG programs, and once the PSU’s list is declared they quit PG programs to go to work.
So officially as the an enrolled candidate of MTech quits the institute in the official books its recorded as dropout. Similar is the case of PhD, where most of the students once they get selected into foreign universities, they quit in the middle of the year and leave, which again gets recorded as dropout
Though majority of the dropouts are PG/PhD student, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t any dropouts from UG level. Yes, people at UG level too drop from their BTech programs, but comparatively they constitute minute percentage.
Cannot cope with pressure
Almost all the teen agers in India have this feeling that once hey clear HSSC and get into the college of their choice “ life set hai”, and IITians are no different to it. A mentally worn out drained pupil when he steps into the grand campus of IITs, he feels now the “chill” mode of life is activated. Previously in school where one used to compete with classmates/tuition mates, now one has to compete with India’s best brains, who just like oneself have cracked JEE. Its a common saying at IITs, “ You must be a topper at your school but not here, as here everyone from your class is a topper” Though most of them manage to adapt to this environment quickly, there are some who just can’t take that extreme pressure so they quit.
Though now various IITs have started taking measure like reducing the rigourness of the course, and also a separate proposal for allowing the students to convert their Engineering degree to 3 year BS course is being examined.
Research and better universities
Just like the PG students there are many students at the UG level too who are disappointed with the course structure and they choose to join universities abroad which provides better prospects for them. One of the most famous case is of Chittaranjan Murdia who was JEE topper in 2014, who after studying at IIT-B for one year, dropped out to join MIT, USA.
Instead of wasting time with a poor branch at good IIT, many students choose to study their favorite branch at NIT/BITS/ICT. One such famous example is of this guy who quit IIT-Bombay and joined ICT, Mumbai to pursue chemical engineering and later Stanford for his MBA, who runs a 10 lakh crore conglomerate today-Mukesh Ambani.
‘Raju Rastogis’
For a middle class Indian who has an intelligent son/daughter their expectations are fairly limited to cracking JEE/NEET and making their child engineer/doctor as these professions “mint money”. So under this heavy burden of expectation the child works round the clock and finally after reaching the institute and spending some time here he or she realises that Engineering is not his/her passion. Many choose to quit the IIT and pursue their passion.
One such famous dropper is Prashant Bhushan, who dropped out from IIT-Madras in 1977 to pursue UG in Economics and Political Science and later join law school, becoming one of India’s sought-after lawyer.
Startups
Long before startup India and stand up India, IITs are having their own startup ecosystem, which has seen many entrepreneurs dropping out of the course to pursue their business. Most notorious is Rahul Yadav, a boy who studied in a Hindi medium government school in Rajasthan, came to Kota, cracked JEE, went to IIT-B to study CS, and just for fun hacked into Dominos site to get free pizza, and before he graduated, launched a million dollar startup called Housing.com, which was backed by Softbank.
Though this story sounds cool, for official purpose Rahul Yadav’s name will go down in the books as “dropout”.
So, when MHRD produces crude numbers exclaiming that some thousands of student have quit IIT, that’s how those numbers are interpreted.
