"Top Companies Need HIGHLY SKILLED MANPOWER And That Number Needs To Be INCREASED IN INDIA"

Commenting on the industry-academia gap and the need for better training, International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore’s Director, Prof. Debabrata Das, tells Yashasvini Razdan from Electronics For You, how IIIT Bangalore is enhancing its curriculum to create better engineers who can contribute vastly to the Indian ESDM sector

- Yashasvini Razdan

What is the goal of setting up an institution like the International Institute of Information Technology?

It's a very good question, as you are going straight to the fundamentals of why IIIT was created. IIIT Bangalore was started in 1998. At that time India was poised to take a spring into the information technology industry. This was in the last century, and at that time, the Y2K problem was very large across the globe and a lot of manpower was needed in the information technology sector from India to solve the Y2K problems across the globe. Hence, the government of India and the state governments of India found that more manpower was needed in this niche technology area.

So, to give importance to information technology-industry and academia this new set of institutions was set up at that time, called as IIITs. The main aim of these institutions was to focus on the broad areas of information technology (IT), because IT can be used in agriculture, space, education, and health for the upliftment of society, businesses, banks, and finance. These institutions mainly teach to uplift or train new members and also do deep research.

Why did the government not just set up more Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) focused on the same instead of establishing a completely different set of institutions?

There have been more IITs set up after 2000. Before 2000, there were only six IIITs, but 17 more IITs were added later on. IITs are much larger because there are at least 10 departments ranging from mechanical, chemical, civil, electronics, electrical, computer science etc.