Indian Institutes of Management

But then, we don't realize as to how well, like, how much of the for-profit world's progress happens because of the non-profit research and stuff like that that happens.

Like, you know, imagine a universe where of India without the Indian Institute of Science, without the Tata Institutes, without the IITs, without the IIMs, which are all broadly non-profit or the Bhabha Atomic Research Centers.

You know, what we would have or even in terms of like COVID, how there was like this public-private philanthropic partnership that came in that we were able to do delivery systems Our vaccine delivery system was amazing because the nonprofit sector had built that vaccine delivery system with like Rotary Club and others for polio.

Like, you know, for polio, we had built it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, so I happened to have an offer to join one of them, an Indian Institute of Management.

And, um-

And this is while you're work- so you're working-

Um, especially in rural India especially, or, um, in, in a lot of other places you don't have the, uh, you know, world-class universities or you don't have even nationally as many reputed or credible universities as you should.

Well, you have the IITs and the IIMs, no?

Yes, but w- what is the extent to which or what is the percentage of Indians who are, uh, being educated in the IITs or-

Right.

Right

... or IIMs, right? So, um, I think that might be a much larger issue in a country like India, uh, relative to the size of the population, of course.

Um, you have, um, uh, probably hundreds, hundreds and thousands or millions of engineers being graduated every year in India.

However, um, the number of people who might be securing jobs, um, in their relevant field might just be a, a, a, a proportion of that, a tiny proportion of that.

that gives your brain that different kind of stimulation and that children also should be encouraged to have something outside of their education that they are interested in because that will help them when this collapses.

You know, children who have been brought up like performance machines, you know, IITs, IIMs, stoppers, but they have no hobby and no passion, find themselves struggling with so much of depression, loneliness and breakdowns later on in life versus those who have a hobby or they have a passion, you know, like, okay, I like to sing or I like to run a marathon or I like to paint.

They always are able to channelize.

and move there.

So, rooms and cycle stands are just a part of a much bigger shift at some of India's top public institutes.

You see, the IITs and IIMs, or the Indian Institutes of Management, are being encouraged to depend less on funds from the central government.

And so they are turning to their alumni.

But even though this shift has been going on for about a decade, the latest playbook for the institutes is the silver jubilee reunion, when a batch comes together 25 years after their graduation.

They picked these institutes because their recent fundraising data was publicly available.

Data for IIT Kharagpur was dated, and most of the newer IITs were not old enough to have reached the silver jubilee milestone yet.

IIMs, on the other hand, do not publicly disclose the 25-year reunion fundraising figures, so a like-for-like comparison would have been difficult.

And they found that while government funding is still the institute's largest source, philanthropy makes up around a fourth of what they get from the government.

Because I could not hold the grades.

And could not get into a proper business school like an IIMS.

Too much trying to prove that I was somebody.

I got into Microsoft, and two and a half years later, they let me go.

24, I would say.

And for some reason, I might have some personal biases, but I felt that I talked to my friends, obviously, who are studying at IIMS.

And then I obviously talked to my friends who are doing masters in US.

I kind of felt that MBA is not something that I want to do right now.

Only 15% of kids in the US go to private school.

If anything should be at free and at quality, it should be K-12 education, right? And while the creation of IITs, IIMs, AIMs has been masterful in higher education, it is a scandal on the neglect of primary education that happened after independence, right? It just seems like a blind spot in policymaking.

And the 1948 Radhakrishnan report, the 1968 Kothari committee report, the 1986 new education policy just did not focus on primary education.

And if you think about prepare, repair, and upgrade as a continuum, you know, you can't teach people in six months what they should have learned in 12 years.