Dr. (Prof.) S. Sadagopan, founding-director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B, estb.1999), recently retired from the institute after long innings of 22 years during which he established IIIT-B as one of India’s most well-respected higher education institutions for developing human resources for the country’s booming IT and ICT (information and communications technology) industries.

An engineering graduate of Madras University with a PhD awarded by the high-ranked Purdue University, USA, in his long and dedicated career in Indian academia, Dr. Sadagopan taught at IIT-Kanpur, IIM-Bangalore and IIT-Madras prior to being appointed founding-director of IIIT-Bangalore in 1999.

This is an abridged version of a 47-minute Zoom interview with Dr. Sadagopan. For the full interview, see www.educationworld.in

With Indian industry already being served by over 3,000 engineering colleges and more than a dozen IITs, what was the motivation for establishing IIIT-B in 1999? What were its major aims and objectives?

The IITs and engineering colleges provide multidisciplinary engineering education. With the fast growth of the IT industry from the 1990s onwards, IIITs were established in Hyderabad and Bangalore to exclusively serve the needs of the IT industry to develop the manpower needed to take this industry to the next level. The second special feature of IIIT-Bangalore in particular, was that we focused on admitting postgrad M.Tech students, unlike IITs and engineering colleges that produce hundreds of B.Techs and few M.Techs. So, we started with 150 M.Techs right from day one and introduced an undergraduate programme after a decade. We also focused on preparing our graduates for products and technology companies — Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, HP and the like. All this differentiates IIIT-B from the IITs and engineering colleges.

How satisfied are you with the evolution and progress of IIIT-B?

With all humility, I am more than satisfied. Not only me, even IIIT-B board members and the Central and state governments. Today, there are more than 25 IIITs and the success of IIIT-B substantially influenced their promotion. In the past 22 years, we have graduated 3,500 students and certified another 10,000 through online education. Right from the start, the quality of IIIT-B alumni has been greatly appreciated by the IT industry. For instance, the US-based GE hired 51 of our very first batch of 150 graduates; and, at one point of time more than 200 of our alumni were employed by SAP, the German IT multinational.

IIIT-B was established as a tripartite joint venture with the Union government, government of Karnataka and private investors. How satisfied are you with the academic and administrative autonomy granted to the institute by government during your tenure as director?

The government of Karnataka was the largest investor in IIIT-B by way of cash and land grant. A significant amount of investment also came from the IT industry. I must place on record that the Karnataka government and Government of India fully respected our autonomy. Indeed, I attribute the success of IIIT-B to the full autonomy the institute enjoys in admitting students, recruiting faculty and staff and the way we manage the institute.

The institute has been successful in recruiting highly qualified faculty from top universities around the world. Yet students’ tuition-cum-residence fees are modest averaging around Rs.2 lakh per year. To what extent is education subsidised by government?

We have been lucky because of our location in Bengaluru. Over the past 20 years, a large number of business professionals and engineers who had emigrated from the US, UK etc relocated to work in India’s IT industry. Because Bangalore is an industry hub, when we recruit faculty, spouses can also easily get employment in Bengaluru. This is the locational advantage we enjoy and this has helped us attract excellent faculty, in addition of our core strengths.

How satisfied are you with IIIT-B’s IT industry placement record?

Som Mittal, former chairman of NASSCOM who was on our board, used to say that for IIIT-B, the graduates’ placement season was a swayamvaar. Companies had to dress themselves up to be chosen by our graduates. Placement has never been a problem — 100 percent placement is normative, so we don’t talk about it.

What are the average starting salaries that your graduates get?

I don’t remember the exact figures. But our average is around Rs.14 lakh per year with the brightest graduates snapped up for Rs.1.5-2 crore. One or two companies pay that kind of money.

There’s a school of opinion that says India’s IT industry is relatively underdeveloped and derives much of its impressive revenue doing low-end jobs for offshore, IT multinationals. What’s your comment?

This is an interesting comment that’s often made. Indians love to run down our own people and our own companies. But although it’s laudable to aspire to execute projects at the high end of the value chain, every link in the chain is important. India is a country of 1.3 billion people. So we need to employ people at all levels of the value chain. Therefore, I would request everybody to stop thinking that our IT industry does only low-end jobs. The plain truth is that Indian IT companies are executing projects along the entire length of the value chain. It’s not so well known that 60-65 percent of bank accounts worldwide are serviced by software designed by Infosys, TCS and I-Flex (acquired by Oracle). Five of the 200 original apps in the Apple Store during its launch, were designed by an Indian company — Robosoft from Udupi, a tiny town in coastal Karnataka.

Moreover, it’s important to remember that compared to American corporates, Indian companies were late entrants into the IT industry. In the next 20 years, you will witness our companies doing much more high-end work. In short, India’s IT companies are executing projects across the spectrum, including high-end.

None of India’s science and technology HEIs (higher education institutions) is ranked among the Top 100 of the authoritative London-based agencies QS or Times Higher Education. How satisfied are you with the quality of science and technology education in India?

Our higher education institutions have to go a long way, no doubt, but our investments in higher education are minuscule. I taught at Rutgers University, USA, a large university with 85,000 students and an annual budget of $4.2 billion. Likewise, MIT which has just 10,000 students has a budget of $2 billion.

Against this, the annual budgets of all IITs and IIITs put together would be around $1 billion. We are still a very poor country, and our investment in higher education is much smaller. Moreover, some of the parameters used by international ranking agencies such as number of international students, faculty-student ratio and academic reputation place our universities at a disadvantage. If we go by citations alone, IIT-Delhi is near the median, surpassing many global universities as pointed out by IIT-D’s Prof. Ramagopal Rao in an FB post last month.

India has had a bad history of neglecting human capital development. How optimistic are you that we can transform into a major economic superpower by 2050?

I am optimistic for several reasons. For one, alumni of our IITs, IIITs, NITs have been successful in nurturing a large number of unicorn companies — 24 this year alone. Secondly, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is serious about improving higher education and the government is taking it seriously. Unlike previous educational policies it is not collecting dust, it is actually getting implemented. Third, India’s position in the overall comity of nations has also improved dramatically. Foreign perceptions about India and capabilities of Indian engineers, doctors and business professionals have changed dramatically.

Because of this, I expect greater investment inflow into higher education. Investment in R&D is increasing and alumni of IITs, IIITs and NITs are pouring money into their alma maters. The survival for over 20 years of EducationWorld, a unique publication in Asia focused on education upgradation and improvement across the spectrum, is also another important development. All this put together makes me optimistic about the future.