You can view excerpts from this interview in our video link

In the first part of the Interview, Dr. Ananth recalled his childhood days and answered questions on Molecular thermodynamics, Mathematical modeling, the ongoing research projects at hand and the four-fold mission of IIT. Following is part II of H Ramakrishnan's Interview with Dr. Ananth.

M S Ananth: We have several kinds of MOUs to help the colleges improve their standards. That is again a mandate.

When I became the Director, we had evolved a strategic plan. .When we wrote the project I was told that the Director had the right to write the vision. My vision, which is reflected in the IIT's Vision statement, is that IIT should be an institution in dynamic equilibrium with its environment, social, economic and ecological. We should take up socially relevant projects. These are projects we take up voluntarily. They are done by faculty and students with no expectation of reward – monetary or by way of certificate. The satisfaction they derive out of it is the reward. Ironically, the very first project that we took up got us money. It was a project on phosphate binding agents for dialysis patients.

DIALYSIS

Dr. Ravichandran of Vijaya Hospitals told us that this Sevelamer hydrochloride is a drug that dialysis patients need. It is very expensive. Prof. Sankararaman of the Chemistry Department felt that it was a simple molecule that he could synthesise in the lab. Within six months of our taking up the project, we had the product in the market at one tenth the price. Of course, not all problems have such nice solutions. Like this there are many projects. For example, we work with Gandhigram where we are converting liquid vegetable dyes that they have made into solid vegetable dye products. We are doing this with the Intellectual property rights remaining with Gandhigram. We get nothing from this project. Our expenses are however met by a project called RUTAG -Rural Technology Action Groups, a project started by Dr. Chidambaram, the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Govt. of India. He funds us to encourage rurally developed technologies. But we don't make any profit from that. Such Projects have created awareness among our faculty and students of the need to help society.

Rama: You have been telling the Ministry of Human Resources Development that we should have at least ten per cent faculty from all over the world. You have also said elsewhere that MIT in the US, for example, does not ask you whether you are from India, or for that matter, from any other country. Do you have the freedom here, as yet?

M S Ananth: I have the freedom, but not in practice. In India, if I have to appoint somebody, I have to get clearance from various Ministries. That takes a long time. The ideal thing for a good academic is for him to be able to receive a letter, get the Visa and come and join. Good academics are also very sensitive people. If you put any obstacle in their way, they wouldn't come. It is not as if the US did this by design. It just happens to be a country of immigrants. You see science is universal. But the scientists have a bag of prejudices. It is good to have people from different prejudices. If you have a collection of people with different prejudices, at least some of the prejudices can be overcome.

Rama: Yes, You have been a champion of having unlike minds. Have you made any headway in India?

M S Ananth: Not really. I have been telling the Ministry that at least twenty five per cent of the seats should be filled by foreign students. I mean people of different cultures. Unless I do that IITs will never be international. We have this notion in India that everything is scarce. It is all in the mind. Seats are scarce and if we give seats to foreigners we will be denying seats to our people. What they don't realise is that if I introduce twenty five percent foreigners, the remaining seventy five per cent will be enriched so much that you will more than make up for the loss of seats.

Secondly, such institutions will grow. The US has now fifty Universities of reasonable repute and fifteen, of extra ordinary repute. How did they get there? It is only by a mix of these minds.

Rama: What do you think about the quality and standard of our youth?

M S Ananth: Basically they are very bright, in terms of raw intelligence. I have taught here and in Princeton. I think the average quality of the class here is better than in Princeton. But one of the things that happen in India – and this happens to scientists as well – is that life can be wary. If you are I the west and if you are a scientist, you don’t seem to have practically any other concern. Everything, the infrastructure, is very well laid out. You don’t have to worry about inflation or housing. Here, unless you plan things at the right time, things could be difficult. I have faculty who are very bright. Suddenly, they are worried. They want LKG admissions for their children in a good school. As Director, IIT Madras I have written six letters for LKG admissions and only two thirds of them have been successful. When their children come to plus two, for a year, the faculty members are not productive because they are worried about the future of their children.

RESEARCH FUNDING

Secondly, - and this is not a criticism -the kind of money that is invested in research is much higher in the West than it is here. MIT in the US spends per faculty member hundred to two hundred times than what I spend. And, IITs are well-funded compared to other institutions.

And, China, for example has increased its funding tremendously. Chinese funding is reaching fifty times my funding. If you believe that knowledge economy requires the highest level of scientists, and it is an investment worth making, then you should go all the way to increase it. In research you can never make an investment saying, ‘I will put in five rupees and I should get fifty.’ This is a long term investment. The returns are intangible. Over a period of time, you will get tremendous results.

Rama: There is a feeling that Information technology is getting too much of focus, relegating the real sciences to the background. What is your opinion?

M S Ananth: It did happen some years ago. It is no longer true. Seven or eight years ago, in our placements, we found one-third of our students going abroad, one third going into management and two thirds of the remaining one third going into IT regardless of their background. In fact, one Ph D in Organic chemistry went into IT when we sat up and took notice. A very simple step corrected the whole thing. It turned out that in placements the IT industries were coming first. The students felt that once they get jobs in IT industry and when they are not sure of getting jobs in the hardcore industries, they joined the IT industries. Four years ago, we changed the order. We requested the hardcore companies to come first and now, hardly ten per cent of my students go into the IT sector. One should also realize that the IT sector economy has been on a very aggressive growth path.

Rama: You had been a key person in the preparation of IITM Vision 2010. How far have you achieved in this?

M S Ananth: We have achieved almost all that we originally wanted to achieve in 2010. In fact we are starting a second strategic plan now. We are launching it this September. This will be either for 2020 or 2015. Things change so rapidly that the question is if you have to predict for ten years or for five years.

His was started by the Board of Governors of IITM when Prof. Natarajan was the Director. The idea was that there are several environmental changes with which a University has to cope. One issue for example was that it was increasingly felt that Universities, as investments for the future, was something that the public was reluctant to put their money in. The Ministers were thinking of the returns. It is difficult to find tangible results from Universities. You can at best quantify indirectly, but not concretely. Man power sophistication increases in a subtle way. You don’t know where it is leading.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Nevertheless, Governments, even in the West demand accountability. Second issue is the nature of funding. They said they would provide block-grants and autonomy within that. If you want more funds, you have to find resources. Finding resources for research is a difficult proposition. Even an institute like the MIT in the US, gets 80 to 85 per cent of its real funding from Uncle Sam, i.e., from the Government. A large number of sponsored researches are through Government Departments like Defence. And the third point is that if you make money the central issue, scholarship takes a second seat. For example, I did my Ph D in the US and I taught in the Princeton University in the early eighties. In early nineties, I taught in the University of Colarado. I have been taking these sabbaticals. Every ten years I get to see the US in perspective. Even there, I find that people who bring in money are becoming more important than those having scholarship. It certainly affects the nature of your approach to learning.

LAKSHMI

Our scriptures say basically that you cannot have Lakshmi and Saraswathi together. Now Lakshmi seems to be winning hands down. I think the importance of Saraswathi has also got to be emphasized in the long run. My worry is – and it is the same worry I find abroad as well – that scholarship should not take a second seat.

Secondly, if you have too much of industrially sponsored research and industrial money flowing in, you could easily end up driving your graduate students towards industry-specific research. So you loose certain wholeness of knowledge in lieu of specialization that is not particularly useful to society as a whole.

SURVIVAL SKILLS

I have a take on this. Education basically supplies two kinds of survival skills. One is survival skills of the individual. This essentially consists of information. For example, if you work for an industry, it is not crucial that you know what is to be done. Sufficient if you know who knows. Approach the person, get things done. This is information and not knowledge. Secondly you need certain resourcefulness. You need a certain elasticity of conscience. That means the Dharma of different people is different. The Marketing manager and the Purchase manager have somewhat conflicting Dharmas. But the two should be able to live side by side in society, without getting into fights as individuals. This requires some elasticity of conscience, the ability to know your place and understand the other man’s place. Then, you do need some professional knowledge. These are requirements for individual survival.

Institutions of higher learning however are actually concerned with survival of what I call civilization as a whole. There you need professional knowledge. You need faith that professional knowledge can improve the lives of all people. You need a sense of aesthetics, a sense of ethics, a sense of history and culture. Because, technology is not in isolation. It has to be located in a culture and you have to know the culture of your place and how technology fits there. This breadth of view can come only from education that appears non-focused, but feeds the mind with different in puts so that your mind, as a student’s mind assimilates these and comes to its own perspective. This is something that only Government can support. Industry can support the survival skill of the individual. So, essentially you have to decide in the long run what a University is about. The strategic plan is about these things.

GOVERNING UNIVERSITIES

The next point is, how do you govern a University? If you bring in too much of beaurocracy, you can ruin a University. There is big difference between the academic environment and the industrial environment. The latter tends to be hierarchical. It is focused on a bottom-line. The academic environment is primarily about intellectual activity. It is about going about blind alleys to find if they are blind. It is about searching without having a specific goal. But, searching for truth. That freedom, you need in some places. You need it in the Universities. You have to preserve that character of the University. President Charles M. Vest of the MIT once said – I don’t remember the exact words, but he said effectively – that the greatest risk for an academic institution is not the apparent chaos with which it works, but the risk of beaurocracy introducing values that do not belong to an academic environment. Monitory incentives, for example are often the last gasp of an academic institution in trouble. I think it is a very profound statement. The monitory incentive may be attractive to an individual faculty member, but the value system in the University will be destroyed.

In the last six years, I have been able to recruit two hundred very bright, young faculty members, who had opportunities of getting twice or thrice the money outside. They chose to come to IIT because they knew what they re coming for. They have freedom. They have no boss in the true sense of the word. Of course there is some discipline involved, which is there everywhere. A strategic plan looks at all these. We look at revenue generation which will not prejudice the core values of the University. You have to nurture integrity and creativity. There are individuals who are very difficult to manage, but if they are creative, you have to encourage them. An industry may not be able to do that. But I must do that. This is a continuous process. As Goethe said, he alone deserves freedom who earns it everyday anew. . You can’t say you knew it yesterday.

SUSPENSION OF FAITH

The other thing is you can have teaching neglected very easily. If you look at the career of a Professor, it is the research that gets him his promotion. Because that is the tangible thing he can show. So, it is easy to neglect teaching. We have to protect against that.

Again, as Charles Vest said, you must not allow suspension of faith. You see, the results of science are not so important as the method of science.

These are things built into the strategic plan document. The idea is to share it with everybody.

I should confess that when I completed the strategic plan, a thought entered my mind: Is there something Indian that is of value that has got neglected in the process? I do not know the answers to these questions. But I have been raising it in several fora.

For example, our Upanishads tell us that there are three obstacles to learning. One is your mind that is covered by dirt, which has to be overcome by Yoga. Second is the process of learning. The process of observation can itself become clouded. Thirdly, the object itself is covered by a veil. The way to penetrate through that veil is to have a GURU. You may not agree with this. But five thousand years ago, if a civilization could think of this, analyse a process like this. And, how does this Indianness come into our educational system?

Swamy Vivekananda said that there is a central note around which all other notes of a civilization come into harmony. He said that the central note of India is spirituality or religion. For England it is politics, according to him. How do we weave this spirituality in? It doesn’t mean you use spirituality to give vague scientific explanations.

How do you build in the culture of humility and faith in a higher power? There is one accusation against scientists and technologists that they get arrogant. It is not true of all scientists, but it is not an invalid accusation. How do we guard against it? As rabindranath tagore said, teaching or developing technologies without values is like cutting a tree and using the logs for fire. It will never bear living fruits and flowers. How do you teach your students values even before you teach them technology?

INNOVATION

The point is that the real constituents of the current global economy are innovation and competitiveness. Innovation is of two kinds. One is what is descibed by Warren Stuart as a magic garden. You have brilliant people in the University. You have to provide the tmosphere to work in. You hope flowers would bloom. Some times they don't. But when they do, they do it so beaytifully that you have your money's worth out of it. The more mundane approach is the idea factory approach, where you bring together unlike minds in one place and in the interaction of unlike minds, ideas emerge. Here, you manage it like a factory. This is a kind of research park. So, if you introduce an industrial R&D close to the University, then you have three kinds of minds coming together. The Professor who knows the subject well, the industrial representative who knows the market well and a student who is ignorant of what is impossible. A young mind which is unburdened by knowledge, is also freer to think. That idea, tempered with the wisdom of the Professor and the drive of the industrial researcher can take products to the market place. Silicon valley, for example has had a large number of discoveries. We have a Research Park here. As Louis Pasteur said, 'In the fields of observation, chance favours only those minds that have been prepared.' We have been preparing the minds, but the discoveries are in US.

ACADEMIC LAND

I could convince the Tamil Nadu Government. The then Chief Secretary asked me, you have 620 acres of land and why do you want 12 acres. I told him that my land is pure academic land and I will do commerce across the road and not on my land. He instantly agreed. They have given me 11.4 acres. I am already building three towers on that land. I am looking for ideas.

Another problem is we have hardly any faculty for the five hundred thousand seats in Engineering Colleges. One of the contributions IIT can make is to make courses available through the web and through video. We have made a beginning in this. We have created 120 courses each in web and in video. This is the largest of its kind. It is free. These courses can be seen on U-tube.

VIRTUAL IIT

My eventual ambition is to produce a virtual IIT. Out of three hundred thousand students who write the IIT entrance exam, in our experience, about twelve thousand are very good. At least they must be given IIT education. At the moment we only admit four thousand. You need 21 IITs. And, where will you go for faculties? We should set up laborataries in fifty places in India to which these students will go in Summer. Eventually, we have to use this method.

Ideally India needs at least one IIT in every state.

Rama: Finally, one question. You have been a hardcore scientist all your life. Do you believe in God?

M S Ananth: This is a tricky question. Yes, I do. In fact, in our society there has never been a conflict - between scince and belief in God. Scientists deal with aparaa vidya, dealing with earth matters. It deals with what you observe and what you see. Religion deals with paraa vidya, the beyond. If you go through the Vedanta, which comes at the very conclusion of Upanishad, it says, 'I have dealt with aparaa vidya. What would follow is para vidya.' Thus there is no conflict between science and religion.

INNER PEACE

Religion is useful in as much as it put things in perspective. But the minute you use organised religion as a power, problems arise. We obtain tremendous amount of inner peace through treligion. Ultimately you might say God is a crutch that you invented. You need it and the crutch doesn't need you. Secondly, many of us in this country naturally believe in the Githa philosophy of Karmanyedhikarasye ....."To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction". I think it is is far too important a philosophy for us to ignore.That makes you do what you think is right , knowing fully well that there is a greater force that will determine the outcome.

In our culture intuition has always come to people with humility and faith in God. It is too important a cultural characteristic for us to ignore. It is important not to be foolishly ashamed of a culture. Of course we can always reword it in modern idiom.

Rama: Thank you, Professor

M S Ananth: Thank You.

Part I

You can view excerpts from this interview in our video link