The IIT Council's and the MHRD's proposal to hike the MTech fees in IITs by 900 per cent and do away with the stipend for MTech scholars was met with a lot of criticism from IIT students and aspirants across the country. Even though the IIT Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao tried to justify the rationale behind the proposal, students are still not very convinced. One such student is Shubham Singh, who is pursuing his MTech from IIT Delhi. Unlike the rest of the crowd, Shubham has drafted a proposal in which he has suggested a number of alternatives to replace the fee hike.
Shubham's proposal suggests three feasible suggestions to the IIT Council. The first solution is increasing the fees while retaining the stipend. "The students could take a loan and then the monthly expenses would have been taken care of by the stipend. We would have kept a criterion that only those who publish at least one/two research papers in a reputed journal, will get the full fee waived off," says Shubham. While the second solution is to increase the CGPA bar during admissions, the third solution is collecting deposit money from the students and returning it to them only after the completion of the course.
The set of solutions are written in the form of a research proposal. It addresses the problem, discusses its pros and cons and gives suggestions and a conclusion. While it thoroughly criticises the IIT Council's proposal, it also explains why Professor Rao's reasons are not convincing enough. In his post, Rao said, "Many top universities in the world have strong Bachelors programmes and strong PhD programmes. The universities which are running large masters programmes abroad are looking at these as revenue earners and charge a huge fee." But here's what the proposal says about it, "If we are comparing ourselves with MIT and Harvard, we should also keep in mind that a major portion of Indian population is either poor or middle class. The stipend was a determining factor for those interested in research but were compelled to work after B Tech [sic]."
The proposal also goes on to criticise the IITs. "IITs are lacking in the research as well as placement aspects," it says. "They have to be clear in their intent of taking admissions. For researchers, there should be a separate psychological interview to get their insight and vision about the researches they want to do," it adds.
The proposal is up on avaaz.org. Shubham said that he will submit it to Rao once he gets 200 signatures on it.
Read the entire proposal here:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/community_petitions/IIT_Council_The_decision_of_fee_hike_no_stipend_will_impact_the_research_and_higher_education_badly