Are IITs losing their edge?

"IITs still have their charm" was the newshead line on CNBC tonight. The news was with reference to the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to be conducted on Sunday (12th April).
The news report described how despite the lacklustre placements and the global slowdown, there is a rise in the number of students appearing for the JEE.

Considering the fact that the internet has penetrated in the tier 3 cities and the rural areas coupled with the rise in the awareness amongst parents of the fact that the IITs are the best insitiutions in India for engineering (thanks to the mass media), it is so obvious that more students will opt for the IITs.

Well my point here is that the IITs are actually losing their edge as the premier educational institutions in India on the academic front. To prove this point, I will illustrate an example I have had while working for SI Group India Limited.

As a part of its Corporate Social Responsibility, the organization SI Group India Limited (Formerly Herdillia Chemicals Limited) allows students of chemical engineering from engineering colleges in Mumbai like IITB, D.J.Sanghvi, etc. The educational course mandates that the students need to have atleast one chemical plant visit in their third year. Thus, the plant visit helps the company as well as the educational institution. (both benefit through the activity). But do the students (for the benefit of whom the whole exercise is conducted) actually benefit?

Well most of the teachers will say that the exercise helps students see how a chemical plant and various unit operations which they have learnt. Even I felt that this should be the case. But after looking at the students who visited SIG for the past two years, I felt that students were not really interested to see the actual working of the plant. They just came to the plant to satisfy the compulosry attendance criterion. Let me give my personal experience.

I was asked to show the plant to the students for a couple of times this year (and thrice the last year). I started with a small presentation highlighting different products of the company and the processes for their manufacture. I deliberately didn't say some important things (like the type of packings, trays, reactor and other things of importance for a chemical engineering student) thinking the students will want to know them. But to my disappointment, no one in all the batches asked any questions. They were sitting only with the intention of finishing the task asap and leave the factory. Further, during the plant round, out of a batch of 30 students, only 3 or 4 students were found to actually listen to what I was saying. Infact, about 10 students were actually chatting something else (maybe films) and were about 30-40 meters away from me and did not hear even a single complete sentence from me during the plant round. There were only 3-4 students who were actually excited to see the plant. Others were disinterested to it.
Adding to my horror, it happened once that even the guide who had come with the students was not aware of the basic equipments of a plant. How the hell was he supposed to teach students?

One of the things that I learnt from their plant visit was that the chemical engineering course at IIT didn't include the 'environmental engineering' as a part of their syllabus. Now that's ridiculous. Even small colleges where chemical engineering is taught (Say PVPIT at Sangli, D J Sanghvi or LIT) have a compulsory course for environmental engineering. Basically, chemical engineering is incomplete without environmental engineering. Students didn't even have any idea about effluent treatment plant (let alone its working which we had been taught in detail).

These experiences imply the these students have actually joined IIT with the intention of securing high paying jobs and not with the intention of acquiring knowledge. Further more, the teachers here are basically just doing their jobs but not nurturing talent (atleast at the undergraduate levels. I know that at PhD level, the quality of researches is excellent) nor do they wish to change their syllabus or even consider to ammend a part of it so as to make it more industrially relevant. Later while chatting with the VP of the company, I realized that even he shared the same view.

So, have the students come to the best educational institution of India with a view of getting high paying scale jobs? Also what is the use of teaching students something which is incomplete and not of the standards which a normal person (who sees TV and feels that ppl at IIT get the best knowledge available) ?
If this condition persists, I feel that the IIT's will really lose their edge of being the best. Something has to be really done to change the attitudes of students coupled with significant changes in the syllabus (atleast the syllabus of chemical engineering - other branches I have no idea) so that they retain their status of being the best.