Empowering IITs With Greater Autonomy Could Boost India's Progress

Few institutions embody the ambition of independent India as powerfully as IIT Kharagpur. The campus stands on the site of the former Hijli Detention Camp, where British authorities imprisoned freedom fighters and killed two unarmed detainees in 1931. Less than twenty years later, the same site was transformed into India’s first Indian Institute of Technology. A place once used to suppress Indian thought became a centre for producing scientists and engineers who would contribute to the country and the wider world.

As IIT Kharagpur marks its platinum jubilee, its history offers a broader message: India achieves its greatest progress when it trusts its own intellectual talent instead of relying on the West to define excellence. The IIT system remains one of independent India’s most successful institutional creations. Its graduates have strengthened Indian industry, contributed to Silicon Valley and gone on to lead major global technology companies. Yet India still does not fully appreciate the scientific and engineering capabilities that exist within the IITs and other leading institutions.

For years, Indian universities have been encouraged to model themselves on institutions such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard. The usual recommendations are familiar: increase research spending, publish more papers, expand tenure systems, improve citation records and rise in global rankings. American universities undoubtedly possess major strengths, and I have spent much of my career working within that system. But India should be careful not to reproduce its shortcomings. American universities invest enormous sums in research and generate significant intellectual property, yet relatively little of that work ultimately becomes companies, products or technologies that directly benefit society. Academic incentives often reward publications and citations more than practical innovation, encouraging researchers to pursue recognition within narrow academic disciplines rather than focus on translating knowledge into useful solutions.

What is particularly encouraging is that many Indian IITs are beginning to move in a different direction. Having worked closely with IIT Madras, IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur, I have witnessed a significant transformation from the environment I encountered when I began studying Indian engineering education nearly two decades ago. Indian universities were once often inward-looking and wary of industry, with academics assuming that they alone could determine which problems deserved attention. Increasingly, that mindset is changing. Leading institutions are seeking partnerships with industry, promoting translational research and encouraging technologies to move from laboratories into practical applications.

My own experience reinforces this change. After shifting the R&D activities of my Silicon Valley company, Vionix Biosciences, to the IITs, I have seen the extraordinary technical ability, motivation and ambition of their faculty and students. Across engineering, physics, biotechnology, medicine and artificial intelligence, I have encountered people willing to work on extremely difficult problems. Their capabilities are especially striking at a time when many talented graduates in the West are being drawn toward fashionable areas of technology.

The IITs are increasingly competing with each other not simply for prestige, but for measurable impact. They want faculty to address meaningful challenges, students to build things, research to produce technologies and innovations to become companies, products and practical solutions. Government policy has contributed to this shift, but so has the determination of institutional leaders.

The major obstacle now is bureaucracy. Excessive approvals, committees and administrative procedures—many rooted in structures inherited from the colonial era—consume time and energy that could otherwise be directed toward research and innovation. Leaders such as Suman Chakraborty at IIT Kharagpur are trying to make their institutions more entrepreneurial and impact-oriented, but they continue to operate within systems that can slow meaningful change.

The government should therefore give these institutions much greater freedom. IIT directors need more autonomy, unnecessary reporting requirements and outdated regulations should be eliminated, industry partnerships should be simplified, and institutional leaders should have greater authority to remove bureaucratic resistance. Most importantly, India should stop asking the West to define what a world-class research university must look like. Instead, Indian science and engineering should be organised around the problems that matter most to India and humanity.

That means pursuing deep research in physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, engineering and artificial intelligence while applying those disciplines to challenges such as clean water, early cancer detection, affordable healthcare, energy storage, food security, pollution and advanced manufacturing. Practical problems should not be treated as inferior to fundamental research; solving them often requires major scientific breakthroughs.

The strongest model would bring together the complementary strengths of industry, universities and government. Industry can identify urgent real-world problems, universities can provide scientific expertise and young talent, and governments can fund long-term missions that are too large or uncertain for individual companies to pursue alone. Making these partnerships easier could become one of India’s greatest competitive advantages.

Imagine IITs competing not primarily on placement salaries, citation numbers or international rankings, but on which institution develops the cheapest cancer diagnostic, cleans polluted groundwater most effectively, creates a breakthrough battery, reduces agricultural losses or develops technologies that improve millions of lives. IIT Kharagpur’s platinum jubilee should therefore represent more than a milestone. The institution began as a declaration that independent India could shape its own destiny. It went on to become the foundation of the IIT system. Its next chapter could make an even more important declaration: India does not need to imitate the world’s leading research universities. It has the talent and opportunity to build a model of scientific and technological excellence that is uniquely its own—and perhaps better suited to solving the problems of the future.