I entered into the cabin of Prof V Kamakoti, Director of IIT Madras. He just completed a discussion and was gleaming with a broad smile. I thought it must have been some high-level successful collaboration. But the reason for Kamakoti’s smile was something that I never expected. As a quote goes a man’s highness rests in his simplicity,
When Kamakoti assumed office as Director in 2022, he came head on with a mission to make IIT inclusive and accessible for all. His mantra has been IITM for all. With the foundations laid by professors M S Ananth and Bhaskar Ramamurthi, this institution under the leadership of Kamakoti is becoming reachable for the masses and also reaching the masses. In developed world, universities play a major role in society upliftment. They conduct research to address local problems and that research is converted to product and commercialised. For long Industrial Economist(IE) had questioned about translational research from this world class university. The step in the right direction was the IITM Research Park. It is a buzzing place of the best minds working on world-class products and at the other end is the IIT Madras campus itself. Kamakoti feels he is just an enabler for several changes happening at the campus. Before we know the reason for his broad smile, in an interview with IE, he explains further in detail about his mission.
G20 Presidency
The first educational working group meeting was held at IIT Madras. As a country, I want every citizen to be an undergraduate and I would like to create a concept of a global student. If the student goes anywhere across the world, they must not feel out of place and must have an equal platform. While on one hand we presented our initiatives towards this goal, on the other, I did a detailed study on the list of problems faced in education delivery across the G20 countries. We found that for every challenge, India had a solution, thanks to our vast diversity. If a country faces multilingual problem, we have Bhashini. Around 23 Indian languages can be translated using this. Similarly each country showcased their best methods. Like the theme of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam – one earth, one family, one future, we will be able to come up with agendas for one global student.
As a director…
My top priority is to address student suicides. We have had 5 suicides in 6 months. I do not want to brush it under the carpet. I want to acknowledge and address it and make IIT M a happy campus. We are working with students, faculties and different stakeholders and launched a website https://behappy.iitm.ac.in/. This will have several resources to tackle the issue and if I learn as a director, why my students are troubled, as an institute we would be able to handle it comprehensively. If we successfully address the issue, we would be able to share our learnings to the world. So on the top of my agenda is to make IITM happier by each day.
International campus
Our Tanzania campus will come at Zanzibar and will be open by October 2023 on Vijayadasami day. The campus is spread over 400 acres. Just like Germany came forward to set up IIT Madras, we want to go to other countries and see what help we can do. We have had three visits and decided to send professors from here to set up state-of-the-art courses which will focus on employability and skilling. I am sure that this will be a world class institution in Africa.
AI and more…
Today chatbots are becoming more and more intelligent as we are feeding it with good data. If the data becomes bad, then it will give wrong information. There needs to be a method to train it and remove bias and this opens a very good research problem. Technology and human race will grow hand in hand. It will definitely not demolish humans. Just like when computers were introduced, this will be a phase. I could do this
entire interview with my digital avatar. I am sure that I can feed it with all information and it can even respond much better but you will still feel that something is missing. AI will lack such latent impressions. I believe each of us carry a latent impression, like a pappam and puniyam bank. And based on that belief, we feel there is equality at some level and that makes us happy even today. AI will never be able to replace this crucial aspect of humans.
Giving back to the society
IIT is part of Swayam, a free online education portal which is offered through the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL). The web based courses are free to access and only when the student wants to take an examination to earn a certificate, Rs 1000 per course needs to be paid. Out of 50 lakh registered students, around 6 lakh take the exams. Similarly the BS in Data Science has also seen good results. We see thousands of students from aspirational districts come and take up the course. Next we really want to make a mark in electronic systems. While everybody is behind data science, electronic systems is also very important. Today we have so many devices and to manufacture and service these, we will need human capacity. I am also a member in the advisory board for the Indian semiconductor mission and I am telling from that position. We conducted an experiment with school students in rural areas by giving them a basic electronic kit. This was done along with the Tamil Nadu government. Students in 9th and 10th standard received this and felt more confident after using the practical kit. It helped them understand concepts better. If we are able to reach these kits to all the schools, over the next 4-5 years we can see around 20,000 people emerging very strong in electronics.
Getting back to the gleam on Kamakoti’s face, it was an audio message that he received. A student from a rural school had been a regular at the Rural Interaction Centre started by IIT Madras. It is a remote education system where a huge screen is fitted in a center and from 6 pm – 8 pm subjects like Science, English and Maths are taken by experts in their mother tounge. 75 villages in Tamilnadu and 100 villages in Gujarat are covered by this. The kid had proudly said that he scored a centum and requested to extend the service to few more subjects. He said close to a million thanks and with each one Kamakoti felt more blessed with a glowing smile. “Such moments make me want to take quality education to all nook and corner,” said Kamkoti passionately.
Similar to this there are several projects from IIT that have addressed root level problems in our society and created an impact. A round up of few of them.
