Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's idea to set up an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), an Indian Institute of Management (IIT) and an All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in every state of the country may earn him some political brownie points when he tours states that still do not house any of these institutes. Superficially, the idea appears great, since people in every state would have access to a world-class institute nearer home. But Mr Modi's advisors would do well to look at the state of the eight new IITs already set up by the United Progressive Alliance government between 2008 and 2009, and the six new IIMs set up during 2010-11. After over five years of existence, these IITs still await a permanent campus. And most have failed to fill up even half of the sanctioned posts for permanent faculty.

The story is no better on the placements front. All the new IITs put together achieved a relatively low placement figure of 79-92 per cent. At many IITs, students were given job offers for a salary as low as Rs 3.5 lakh per annum, which is below the minimum annual pay package of Rs 4 lakh even at some National Institutes of Technology (NITs). And in spite of all their chest-thumping, even their older peers have lost a lot of sheen. For example, they have failed to make the grade among top institutions in both the Times Higher Education and the QS World Asian University rankings. The lacklustre rankings reveal, yet again, that Indian universities fail, for most part, to offer world-class education, training and research-based knowledge creation. There are financial issues as well. Setting up a new institute of national importance would cost the government upwards of Rs 250 crore without the land cost. If this money is pumped instead into improving the quality of existing institutions or is provided to them to hand out more attractive salaries to faculty members, much more can be achieved. The last one is the key, since even at the old IITs, 41 per cent of teaching posts are vacant. One way to raise the bar on quality education at the new IITs is to bring in top-notch faculty, but that is easier preached than done. A typical IIT assistant professor starts at about Rs 75,000 a month - less than what many engineers from Tier II colleges get as their first pay cheques. The irony is that even trainers in some coaching centers for joint entrance examination for admission to IITs make six times as much, if not more.

A push towards research is another way to counter the faculty shortage. The Anil Kakodkar Committee of 2010, in its strategic recommendations for the IITs, set a target of 10,000 doctoral fellows being produced annually by 2020-2025, up from the current 1,000. The hope was that some of these PhDs would stay to teach at the IITs. But at present, half of the PhDs leave academics to join industry for better pay. The IIMs, which account for only three per cent of India's output of management students, are facing similar challenges. Autonomy, availability of more resources and enabling better-quality faculty are the key needs of the country's showpiece institutes. That, rather than mere geographical expansion, would be a better option.