Others If you start addressing the ranking parameters, you have, in a sense, lost the battle, says Devang Khakhar (in pic), director of IIT Bombay.

Others We want to be somewhere in between Caltech and MIT, says Anurag Kumar, director of IISc.

Varun Bhalerao studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, but he never expected to return there to teach. That was because he went on to specialise in astronomy, a field of study his alma mater then had little interest in. He earned a PhD from California Institute of Technology , where he studied neutron stars, supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts, complex celestial matters that held little interest to the firmly earth-focused IITs. He was proved wrong.IIT Bombay accepted him readily in early 2017 as its first astronomer. Within a year, it hired four more astronomers. Although astronomy is not yet a major teaching programme, research has started in earnest. Bhalerao is now using the engineering tradition at IIT Bombay to indulge in one of his passions — building cuttingedge telescopes.Bhalerao and his team are developing software for automating an 18-year-old optical telescope at Hanle in Ladakh, the third-highest observatory in the world. He is also working with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to develop gravitational astronomy counterparts, an exciting new field within astronomy.For his telescope-building, Bhalerao works with three different engineering departments — electrical, mechanical and aerospace. “For my work,” says Bhalerao, “I have to be a scientist in an engineering organisation or an engineer in a science organisation.” IITs had science departments earlier, but they were largely silos working independently of engineering departments.Bhalerao’s experience is indicative of changes sweeping India’s marquee technical education schools. Once hide-hound in their ways, IITs and the premier Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru are rethinking their approach to hiring faculty, interdisciplinary research, humanities and much else, and ushering in a lot of flexibility and methods practiced at the best science institutions around the world.This new approach also means they are able to develop multidisciplinary centres and teams working on some very challenging projects. Some of these are of strategic importance to the country, some others tackle fundamental questions in science, while others research problems of interest to industry. A few also look at the grassroots, working on solutions that could help the poor. These changes are also manifesting as innovative courses, departments in new fields and tech startups built in-house.IIT Bombay is a visible face of this change. “We are developing a programme to change the format of education,” says IIT Bombay assistant professor and social scientist Anush Kapadia. “The idea is to burst the silos.”Like Bhalerao, social scientist Anush Kapadia may not have envisioned himself as an IIT professor while pursuing a PhD in anthropology at New York’s Columbia University. He considered Ashoka University and Azim Premji University, but eventually chose IIT Bombay. “They took a while to get back,” says Kapadia. Social sciences are further removed from engineering than astronomy. Once he joined IIT Bombay, he has started taking an active interest in rethinking what it means to provide an IIT education.Across the IITs, there are several professors like Bhalerao and Kapadia, young researchers who may not have quite fit into an IIT system as recently as five years ago. Now they are leading the change, in some ways.In the last five years, India has seen a large inflow of young scientists and engineers, and many of them have made their way into the best IITs, IISC and other elite institutions. According to data with the Department of Science and Technology (DST), there was a 70% increase in the number of fellowships awarded to outstanding young scientists returning from overseas in the five years after 2012, compared with the five years before 2012. Many of these young scientists and engineers have joined IITs, IISc and the emerging Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER).IIT Madras has been recruiting 25-30 young faculty for the last five years. IIT Bombay has recruited more than 30 professors a year since 2012. The newer IITs have been recruiting even more. IISc is hoping to hire a lot of young faculty over the next few years. The net result—the average age of researchers in some of India’s elite institutions has come down from close to 60 in the 1980s to below 40 years now.A younger faculty also means a different culture at these institutions. “We were very diffident in the 1980s,” says G Venkatesh, then an assistant professor of computer science at IIT Bombay and now a professor of humanities at IIT Madras. “Now the young faculty are very confident and ambitious. They know that they are on top.”This means fresh thinking and a bolder vision — they are now tackling more challenging problems.At IIT Hyderabad, Nishanth Dongari works on missile defence systems, and Kiran Kuchi develops 5G technologies. At IIT Bombay, Bhalerao is trying to create a resurgence of telescope-building in India. Manan Suri at IIT Delhi, who was chosen this year by MIT Technology Review as one of 35 innovators under 35, develops chips inspired by the structure of the brain. At IISc, Pramod Kumar is building a system to use super-critical carbon dioxide. This last one, again, is an illustrative example.Pramod Kumar joined IISc as an assistant professor in 2012, and immediately started working at a problem unusual for the institute developing turbines that use supercritical carbon dioxide, instead of steam. Turbines driven by supercritical carbon dioxide — a material that is neither liquid nor gas — requires no water and can be a tenth of the size of steam-based turbines. It is supposed to be the future in the renewable energy industry (including in nuclear plants), but developing it is hard.So far, no commercial product exists. In 2012, IISc did not have a significant presence in energy research. Now, Kumar has developed the technology — with assistance from other IISc departments — for supercritical carbon dioxide, but the turbine is being built. “Our mandate now is to have a global presence in technology,” says Kumar.As the IITs focus more on research, the student population in the IITs has also been changing in nature, from being predominantly undergraduate institutions to one being dominated by masters and PhD students. This is a profound change, quite in keeping with the ambition of the IITs to become globally-known research institutions. At IIT Delhi, for example, graduate students now make up 65% of its student population. “Our research output is going up because of the graduate students,” says IIT Delhi director Ramgopal Rao. “It is also a reason why our rankings are improving.” Research output is a major parameter in higher rankings.As the IITs and the IISc venures into new areas of research, they are also developing new courses. IIT Bombay is planning new undergraduate programmes in mathematics, earth science, biology, management, humanities and social sciences. On the cards is a master’s programme in film-making. The institute is also considering a master’s programme in fine arts. Among all these, it is focusing on interdisciplinary research, the single most important trend sweeping across India’s elite science and technology institutions.At IIT Madras, the first interdisciplinary centre — on combustion research — was seeded in 2014 by the Department of Science and Technology. Thereafter, formation of such centres have been driven by the faculty. There are now centres on computational brain research, biological systems engineering, and data science and artificial intelligence. IIT Madras organises a grand challenge - a prize of Rs 2 crore - every year for proposals for new interdisciplinary centres.New centres are going to be formed on energy and nanomaterials. In the research park built just outside the campus, chemistry professor T Pradeep is developing a multidisciplinary centre on water that will look at the topic from start to finish - basic research involving many disciplines, developing technology, building products, incubating startups, and manufacturing.Interdisciplinary Projects IIT Delhi also organises challenges to push faculty to form interdisciplinary projects. IISc had its first interdisciplinary centre on climate change a few years ago. Since then, it has added centres on energy and water. New centres are being formed on manufacturing and policy. Pramod Kumar¡¦s supercritical carbon dioxide project is part of the interdisciplinary centre on energy, and IISc has formed another interdisciplinary centre on hypersonic flight. But unlike the IITs, IISc does not plan to become a broad-based institution with strong humanities. "We want to be somewhere in between Caltech and MIT," says IISc director Anurag Kumar. Not too small, but not too big either.India's best research institutions differed from the best in the world in one crucial respect: the mix of academic stars and the rest. Harvard University, for example, has a few stars that grab a disproportionate amount of money and projects, and then a large number of highly competent faculty. Indian institutions have now begun approaching this mix, in relative terms. "Traditionally the tail had been long and thin in the IITs," says IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi. "It is now changing."Some of the IITs have now started pushing students to think in totally new ways. IIT Madras offers students the option of doing an interdisciplinary master¡¦s programme when they are in their third year. IIT Gandhinagar awards a fellowship -called Explorer Fellowship - for six students every year to go around seven states in the country on a shoestring budget of Rs 37,000. The aim of the fellowship is for the students to experience India in all its diversity, and to think about solving its problems later in life.Subodh Kumar, a student of mechanical engineering, went this year to some Himalayan states, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Chickmagalur and Alleppey in 47 days. His project was to study how culture influences beverages in these regions, but the real effect on him was much more than that. When he started, he was sure he would be mechanical engineer all his life. When he came back, he was sure he did not want to be an engineer. "I understood that engineers can do other things also," says Kumar.An IIT education that makes students question the very decision to become an engineer. Now that's real change.