The Hindu : IIT graduates in the IAS

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 03, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

IIT graduates in the IAS

By T.K. Ramachandran

The issue of IIT graduates getting into the civil services has always attracted attention and even a bit of censure. I still remember the first few days at the LBS Academy in Mussoorie in 1991: in our batch of 106 IAS officers we were around 50 engineers and 36 — including the batch topper — were IITians. Even then there were many voices against the so-called internal brain drain and several comments were presented to us — some of them severe on our alleged misdemeanour (of deserting the engineering ship)! I was surprised to see virtually the same arguments being repeated ad verbatim now.

I will speak largely about the IAS and IIT graduates, but I am sure what I have to say holds good for all services and all professionals.

The first argument is that after having obtained professional degrees they are getting into the IAS due to which these seats are lost to those who would have pursued engineering or medical careers. Let us look at some statistics: each year more than 200,000 engineers graduate from around 1200 engineering colleges in the country — 3,000 from the 7 IITs alone. Tamil Nadu, for instance, has 200 or so colleges offering 60,000 seats annually and many seats go vacant for want of takers. The entire annual civil service intake is now only around 500 and even if there are 40 or 50 IITians this would amount to only a tiny per cent of the engineers being churned out by the country or, even from the IITs.

Second, the money spent by the Government on providing a subsidised engineering education is wasted. In every batch of IITians around 30-40 per cent go abroad, about 20 per cent go in for further studies (MBA/M.Tech) within the country and only the rest take up jobs. The nature of jobs is not always engineering related. The proportion of IITians in India in research and teaching and hard-core engineering jobs is low. So, even those not in the civil service are not in jobs related to their fields: would this also be called a wastage?

When an engineer went abroad we called it brain drain (at least till a few years ago). Now we call it brain gain and are proud of our new hero: the NRI with dollars in his pocket. Compared to the NRI, an IITian joining the civil services is able to make a more direct and lasting contribution to the nation and to nation-building. Today, the NRI IITian is an asset; the resident IITian who stayed back to work for the good of his country is a drain on its resources. Some logic!

Third, the notion that civil services are meant for liberal arts or history graduates or public administration students has long been rubbished. Today's civil servant has a very complex, even technical job on hand. Engineers in the IAS have been making sterling contributions within the Government — especially in technology related areas.

As regards quality, a quick look at the cut-off marks for admission to various courses is revealing. The cut-off marks for science subjects are highest at the +2 level all over India, perhaps because of our society's obsession with engineering and medicine. This can only be interpreted to mean that the best of our students — as evident from the marks they score — want to take up science after the 10th standard. Of course, this is not to say that excellent candidates may not opt for commerce and arts. So also, after the 12th standard exams, the highest cut-off marks are for engineering and medicine courses, which means the best among science students flock to these courses. And finally the IITs get the cream of engineering students. Now by saying that IITians in the civil services are a drain we are virtually saying that the best students in the country — recognised as such the worldover — should not enter our public services! Of course it can be argued that exams do not reveal true the potential; that many brilliant students without facilities/tuition are unable to compete. But, these are entirely separate issues that need to be dealt with on a different footing. As long as exams and marks are used to decide merit we have to acknowledge them as a measuring scale. So, how engineers can possibly reduce the quality of intake beats me.

The last argument is that IITians usually opt for engineering/science/maths for their optional papers, which are scoring, and so have an unfair advantage. Believe me, getting a 400 in a maths paper in the civil services is as difficult as in history or psychology. When this issue became a hot topic for discussion a decade back, many IITians taking the civil services exam started opting for at least one arts paper: sociology, psychology, history. Quality, sheer quality, is rarely defeated by artful — or for that matter — artless machinations!

As for the IITs, they have generally taken a dim view of their students studying for the civil services, especially while pursuing master's degrees. Today, the schedule is very tight, I am told. But the belief that engineers not in the civil service are all doing only engineering-related work, as I said earlier, is not true at all. It is a load of idealistic prattle: our labs and research centres and assembly lines simply cannot absorb the engineers we are churning out. I think a civil services career has a lot of challenge for engineering graduates too.

We must realise that there ought to be space for every discipline within the civil services even if the need to have professionals of all hues entering it has never been greater than it is now.

(The writer is a Tamil Nadu Cadre IAS officer and the views expressed are his own.)

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

Stories in this Section

An Asian century, perhaps

CAS and controversy

Reforms and urban poverty

Time to strengthen the U.N. — II

Blair 'cooked up' intelligence on Iraq

IIT graduates in the IAS

Reservation

Quota for women

Horse-trading in U.P.