Focus on women-related issues, quota: IIT director

With IIT Madras also holding the first rank in outreach and inclusiveness, Director Bhaskar Ramamurthi speaks to Ashmita Gupta saying that IIT Madras is more conscious to implement all the policies on women and reservation issues.

Earlier during the QS world ranking none of the IITs featured in top ten, you said that it is because QS world ranking takes into consideration all the universities and institutions on comprehensive way. What would you have to say after holding the first rank as per NIRF?  

In case of global ranking there are two things, rankings based on discipline, which is by engineering, and there are rankings as a university. Rankings as a university and engineering institution specialised will always have difficulty. The NIRF the ranking has been done by discipline.  We have been ranked by engineering category. In India we don’t have comprehensive universities like liberal arts, engineering, medicine unlike the foreign countries.
 
Q What are the strong points of IIT Madras? Where did it beat the rest of the IITs?  
If you look at the scores the other IITs have got, they are fairly close. I don’t think there are any major strong points on one IIT than the other one. For IIT Madras some strong points, which are unique right now, are that, it is the only IIT with a research park. But that has not got us any additional score, as that has not been evaluated in the ranking. Even the incubation cell is a strong point, we are right now incubating almost 100 companies but that is also not included in the parameter of the ranking. Sometimes some of our strong points are not being evaluated.

Q IIT Madras also topped in outreach and inclusiveness, what is your opinion on it?
The NIRF asked us a lot of data including regarding student’s category including gender like the ratio of women in the faculty and students. It looks like we have scored highest. But we have been working on it for a long time. We are very conscious to implement all the policies on women issue, reservation and so on. We are trying to improve on that.  

Q What are the extra effort you would put in as an institution to remain the topper for next year?
We have our plan objectives. Now since the ranking has come out and there are scores in various parameters, we will look at what scores we have got in which parameter. We will see where there is scope for improvement. We are not number one in all the parameters. This has become the additional metric apart from our own objectives. We are constantly trying to asses our research output, our teaching and learning outcome, consultation and so on.