Prof C.N.R. Rao, a Bharat Ratna and recipient of over 60 honorary doctorates from across the world, worked at the department of chemistry at IIT Kanpur during the early and middle parts of his distinguished career. He is now Linus Pauling research professor and honorary president at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore. He took Outlook’s questions on the quality of our IITs:

Are IITs today as good as they were?

Soon after the first IIT was started in Kharagpur, in 1951 or so, I was there as a research scholar. I was one of the first professors at IIT Kanpur when it was started in the early 1960s. The dream of IITs that we had in the early years was that they will become like MIT or CalTech. This has not happened. But the IITs have served the country by producing outstanding graduates. The problem is that there has not been proper balance between R&D and undergraduate teaching. Undergraduate education has been the main contribution of IITs and the contribution to...