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View from the top: Dr Krishna AchutaRao, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Dr Krishna AchutaRao is one of a new breed of Indian academics and researchers who, having lived and worked abroad for many years, are now bringing their international experiences back to India. Their purpose? To forge a new path for Indian higher education and the students enrolled in this rapidly expanding system.
Educated in India, at the prestigious Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, and at Tulane University in New Orleans, USA, where he completed his PhD in 1994 focusing on climate change, Dr AchutaRao returned to India to take up his current post at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi in July 2007. After 20 years away from his home country, Dr AchutaRao chose to take up his appointment at a particularly exciting time for Indian higher education. “This is a period of enormous change for all universities. I foresee that Indian institutions have to go beyond being degree factories and emphasizing rote-learning in traditional compartmentalised fields. Higher education in India has not fully appreciated the inter-disciplinary training of students society needs for the future.”
IIT Delhi, where Dr AchutaRao now teaches, achieved 154th place in the 2008 edition of the Times Higher-QS World University Rankings, the highest position ever achieved by an Indian institution. Joined by IIT Bombay in the top 200, all of the seven IIT’s are recognised for their academic quality and highly competitive admissions standards. This year more than 330,000 students applied to one of the seven IIT’s, with only 5,500 being successful. Such competition is astounding and makes the IIT’s more competitive in terms of admission than Cambridge, Harvard and MIT put together.
“Research as a way of learning and teaching has to become the norm rather than the exception it currently is."
With experience at one of the USA’s top research institutes - The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory - where he was a research scientist in the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, Dr AchutaRao sees the role of his current institution as important in making the Indian higher education system more competitive. “Research as a way of learning and teaching has to become the norm rather than the exception it currently is. The IITs in this country can make sure that this extends beyond PhD programs and includes hands-on learning based on research at the bachelors and masters levels also, he says.”
With the demands on the Indian higher education system increasing every year, changing the way universities teach undergraduate and graduate students is likely to be difficult in the face of limited resources and modest investment in education from government funds. Dr AchutaRao recognizes that the seven Indian Institutes of Technology are pivotal in facilitating the changes that the Indian higher education system needs to undertake. “Traditionally technical disciplines such as engineering and the physical sciences need to interact with the humanities/social sciences or biological sciences. I hope that the new generation of faculty members see the need for change and are in a position to influence the way things evolve at the institutional level.”
Integral to changing the curriculum and approach to university-level education is the influx of international students who currently study part of their degree in India. Although the internationalisation of Indian higher education is in its infancy, academics like Dr AchutaRao see the value in bringing the international dimension into the classroom and laboratory. “With teaching international students, the most important thing I learned from my experiences was the differences in how one communicates with people from different backgrounds. This was not just verbal but a difference in thought process and level of abstraction that students trained in different educational systems have. Such experiences improve the quality for all those involved.”
Such quality is a condition that is often attached to the study abroad experience by academics and students alike. Dr AchutaRao’s experience at IIT Delhi over the last year has certainly included bringing him face-to-face with excellent international students. “I have a couple of international students in my class now who have been really impressive. They had an opportunity last summer to work with an alternative energy firm in Germany looking at suitable locations for wind energy generation. They registered in my course and have been way ahead of everyone else in class as far as their enthusiasm and ability to translate what they learn in theory to the realities of what they faced in their short experience with sophisticated computer models.”
