Navin Kumar

I was awake last night, it had been rough. Was thinking a lot about my life, how it is so much screwed, and what could be done. I am at IIT, the premiere engineering college of the nation. And I was all frustrated, pondering over  the things which went bad. I had no one to talk, it was three in the morning. I was remembering quite a few friends of mine, dialed their numbers, but no response. I was trying to reach a friend of mine, I had met few months ago in Techkriti. Having nothing to do, I thought to look up her college website, silly thing I know, but I was getting all bored, frustrated, and couldn’t sleep. I googled SRMSWCET (Shri Ram Murti Smarak Women’s College for Engineering and Technology, pretty long name, huh!), clicked on the first link that appeared. The site was http://srmswcet.ac.in, which redirected me to http://112.133.199.181/srmswcet/, a site hosted in the sub-directory of the “SRMS group of institutions” web folder. I know these things are too small, but still I notice them, don’t know why. The branch college didn’t have it’s own site, probably because it didn’t want to waste money on web space for several sites for their group, when they could manage by sub-directories. Cool enough, it is always good to save money. Well, I visited the site, looked not bad. The college had four departments of engineering, one of basic sciences, and one for post-graduation in business administration. The training and placement cell has a snippet on the homepage, but the no link to visit the placement homepage. Was browsing through pages, when something caught my eyes. I had clicked on the faculty profiles link. They had listed all their faculties, with their qualifications. And now you can guess what caught my eyes. Among the thirty “professors” in various engineering disciplines, none of them had the qualification above post graduation. Many of them were just graduates, from God-only-knows-where. Regarding the experience in the teaching field, most of them had 1-3 years experience. I then clicked on the careers link, where there was an advertisement posted regarding the recruitment of faculties, which said a minimum of first class bachelors, masters, and two year teaching experience was required for assistant professor. I wondered how come they already had plain bachelors with almost no experience in their list. I later checked out the college fee over there. It was almost hundred grand per year per undergraduate student. And this was just the college fee. The allowed intake totaled to 360 in the engineering disciplines. Calculating the total money the college receives, just from tuition fee, it summed to 360,00,000, around 3.5 crores per year. A little more maths showed that approx 1.5 crore goes to the faculty salaries. Now about the remaining two crores. The institute building had 32 classrooms. The complete campus plot is owned by the trust “chairman”, but supposing they were rented (which note that costs more than having your own land eventually), with a rent of approx two grand per month per room would account to about Rs 7.5 lacs per annum of rent. The campus is much more than the classrooms, so let us scale it up to say Rs 15 lacs. Add another  say 10 lacs on maintaining the infrastructure. Adds up to 25 lacs. Umm.. and let’s add another 25 for miscellaneous expenses, such as staffs, security, etc. We still have 1.5 crore left. If we scaled the expanses by a factor of two, even then there would have 1 crore remaining per year. And all this money going to the bank account of the “chairman”, who is the sole owner of this college. My motto is not to emphasize that private colleges such as this take a lot of money as fee, but to highlight the point that whatever you take, at least give the proper fraction back in terms of educating the students. Earning money is good, no doubt, but like this? Playing with the future of students. You are a private college, you got bucks in your account, why not spend some extra, and get quality teachers. The vision, as posted on the college website is, and I quote “To help build India as a World leader Technical Education”. i know very well this must be some text copied from a similar college’s website, just to use as a filler, but still. Is it like this you are going to build India as a world leader in technical education? Just caring the least about the quality of education, f***ing with the career of the students who once dreamed to achieve some good, and trusted you with their aspirations! Well, you might say, you are from IIT, what have you got to do with all these, your expenses are f***ing financed by the Government, you are getting everything in your life, blah blah. I ask them, does not qualifying a six hour exam denies you from the right to good education? In a country like India, where one out of every fifty or so students qualify, JEE is not a measure of brilliance, there are more brilliant people out there, who have potential to do a lot better if provided with a chance. A platform, a good one is what is required for them. Having made all these calculations, I had made the image of Dev Murti, the owner of the college as a rich and “successful” person. And as they say, you know you are successful when they start searching you on google instead of facebook. Well, I too did my part for Dev Murti. And google’s first suggestion was “dev murti arrested”. Opened the first article, on TOI, and it said, the chairman Dev Murti, and director Aditya Murti (I guess he is some relative to the former Murti) were arrested for some scam related to the medical college owned by the chairman. What more could be said, if such people are there in the education sector too! Feel pity for all the students out there. The people over here really are desperate for money, and the more they get, the more they want, like Midas!