PepsiCo's Nooyi Defies India's Education Odds

It was three decades ago when it first struck M.A. Pai, then dean of research at the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, that his engineering college, one of India's finest, wasn't producing enough graduates.

A visitor from the Soviet Union, who had dropped in for tea at Pai's campus home, was shocked to learn that only 1,900 students made use of the sprawling 1,200-acre facility.

``He stood up, looked at the vast expanse and said that the same space in Moscow would hold 10,000 students,'' Pai recalls. ``I looked at our space usage and he was right -- labs were empty in the mornings and classrooms vacant in the afternoons.''

PepsiCo Inc.'s announcement last week that it was promoting Indian-born Indra Nooyi as its next chief executive officer is being reported in the media as, among other things, proof of the strength of the higher education system India has built over the past 50 years. The success is doubly remarkable because in the same period most other government projects, including a plan to achieve universal primary education, have gone nowhere.

No doubt, the seven Indian Institutes of Technology, one Indian Institute of Science and the six Indian Institutes of Management have given a big boost to India's growing cachet among investors. Nooyi graduated from one of the IIMs in 1976.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management theory, told this columnist in January 2004 that India's edge in higher education would catapult the country to the center of the global economy of the future. India's ``knowledge infrastructure is probably its most important asset,'' Drucker said.

While that may indeed be true, a growing worry within India is the exclusivity of its globally reputed colleges and the resultant opportunity loss for the nation.

Demand/Supply Mismatch

All told, only 5,200 students graduate from these premier institutions each year.

It's too narrow a base for a country of 1 billion people to create its techno-managerial elite and realize its ambition of becoming a knowledge society.

The successes of famous alumni, including Vinod Khosla, a cofounder of Sun Microsystems Inc.; Narendra Karmarkar, the mathematician who wrote a linear-programming algorithm that bears his name; or more recently, Krishna Bharat, the computer scientist who created Google News, are drawing an ever-increasing number of hopefuls to the IITs and IIMs.

It is, therefore, disappointing that not more than 5,000 students in any cohort of young Indians have a chance to obtain a world-class professional education at one of these institutions.

An ocean of mediocrity awaits bright, hardworking students who are neither lucky enough to be perched on one of the few islands of excellence at home, or wealthy enough to pursue education overseas.

The Ignored Majority

The federal government spends a total of 12.5 billion rupees ($269 million) each year on 50,000 students at the IITs, IIMs and other national-level institutions, or 250,000 rupees per capita.

By contrast, for the 6.6 million students enrolled in minor colleges funded by state governments, per-capita federal support works out to just 602 rupees a year, according to recent estimates by researcher Pawan Agarwal at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations in New Delhi.

Restricting the best educational opportunities to an extremely narrow base also reduces the potential talent pool for world-class teachers.

Standards at India's premier educational institutions are sustained by the more academically inclined alumni coming back as professors. This is what enables the IITs to draw Ph.D. holders from the University of California, Berkeley, as assistant professors at a starting base salary of 12,000 rupees a month. By producing less, the IITs and IIMs are limiting their own future expansion.

And boosting the capacity of India's top educational institutions is a big challenge for policy makers right now.

Surviving Quotas

With the government deciding this week to seek lawmakers' approval for reserving more seats in federal-funded higher- educational institutions for people near the bottom of the social pyramid, a scarce public good threatens to become a truly rare commodity.

The hundreds of thousands of aspirants who vie for a seat at an IIT are wary that the expanded quota system -- there's already 22 percent reservation -- will seal their fate. To allay their concerns, the government has vowed to raise the number of opportunities proportionately.

This capacity enhancement should have taken place years -- if not decades -- ago. Spread over time, it would have been less of a financial burden on the government than it is now.

It would also have been much less disruptive.

So why didn't it happen? Technocrats themselves are to blame. Pai had moved a resolution in the IIT Kanpur Senate -- the policy-making body comprising professors and students -- to double the annual intake and also admit freshmen in spring.

Colossal Waste

``The Senate rejected it outright, saying IITs are the Caltechs of India,'' Pai says, referring to the popular acronym for California Institute of Technology, which was part of the U.S. university consortium that helped establish the academic program at IIT Kanpur in the 1960s.

An issue that was so summarily dismissed in 1976 has come back to haunt India as a burning political and economic question three decades later.

For every Indra Nooyi that it is helping create, the top end of the Indian education system is turning away several who must be equally talented. And that is a colossal waste, a much bigger injustice than the one the government is trying to fix with its ill-conceived quota policy.