Prez advises IIT-ians

Prez advises IITians
by Remigius de Souza

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President APJ Abdul Kalam, in his inaugural address advised the IITian, “Create low-cost water efficient, electrically efficient dwelling units with proper sanitation and drainage facilities for the needy in urban and rural areas. The cost of a two-room dwelling unit should not exceed Rs 1 lakh.” Event: PanIIT Global Conference, Mumbai. Date: 23 December 2006. (Hindustan Times, 24 Dec. 2006).

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Where do we go from here?


The government started the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) – branded elite institutes to serve the corporate sector – with foreign collaboration few decades ago. The IIT students recently had organised protests against the reservations for SCs/STs and OBCs. in education and jobs. Not a surprise!


Since the times of Harappa – Mohenjo-Daro, millions of Indians have been living in two-room dwellings (Basham, A.L. “Wonder that was India”) in cities and villages. Until modern times in India the people exercised their autonomy in decision-making, planning, technology, materials, construction and maintenance of their houses within their means, economy and skills by self-help; obviously they are economical and affordable. They display tremendous variety and diversity, and freshness in its form and language that are culturally relevant, however ancient they may look.


With industrialisation and colonisation the autonomy and initiative of the people is lost. Worst than the mach-maligned caste system in India and the racism world over, the industrial society is broken into numerous divisions of occupations and professions controlled by Agency, which of course do not recognise even personal space, leave aside community. It’s a classless mass society; the underclass is not recognised. This may be an influence of deductive methods of sciences and technologies, which are monopolised by a few for profit and power. Certainly the modern sciences and technologies have devised harder building materials, largest /tallest buildings, which ironically cannot stand the forces of nature.

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Modern Technology that failed

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Since last sixty years of Independence, with progress and development in India, the institutes of learning and Agency have failed to solve the aggravating problem of the houseless, besides food. There are 100 colleges of architecture, many more institutes of engineering and a few elitist Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). None of them have carried any research or research projects, which form their curriculum, relevant to this growing malady. None of them have tried to impart skills and technologies to the public that remain in the safe custody of the experts, like Holy Scriptures are held by ‘purohits’ – the priests.


Hoewever they failed to design a house, which is equivalent in quality to that of tribal house design, and the and the tribal skills, used by half-naked tribals. None of the experts, specialists, builders, contractors, either in collaboration or individually, have been able to evolve skills and design for a house on a condition that it could last for a designed period of 5 – 10 – 15 or 20 years, which recovers its cost in the due time, and dismantled or recycled, at the end of period without loss of money or materials, without damaging the environment and ecology that is energy-wise, to be built again as desired by a householder like any ethnic vernacular tribal house. None even thought of it.

In the industrialised mass education during 5 to 10 years of professional courses the aspirants are spoon-fed to produce homogenised projects. From K.G. level to university, the formal mass education at any stage fails to liberate the students who are tied to the shackles of status quo; forget about awakening some social responsibility; they are periodically assessed by grading and degrading. They also are groomed to find the answers from the text / scriptures written by other mortals rather than thinking on their own to see the problems and to find answers – to maintain the status quo i.e. to obey an authority.

Educating the educated: Learning from the People

As I write this note, there is news of a “half-animal” (sic) woman of 27 years age and naked, was found near a village in Cambodia. It is believed that she was lost at the age of 8 when she had taken buffalo for grazing in a forest. It is a story of extraordinary intelligence and survival. How could a child survive for 19 years without parents, family, community, society, police, the State ― without Agency ― to protect her? It is easier to survive ― to live sanely ― in a forest away from urban jungle, away from civilised society that are out to kill fellow humans for any reason, on any pretext, or for personal gratification, either directly or by proxy, may it be Singur, Nithari, Kashmir, Mumbai, Tiananmen Square, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran… She doesn’t know any intelligible language, and in the warm climate of Cambodian forest she doesn’t need shelter or clothing, happily in the forest there is plenty of food.


What will happen to the IIT graduates, experts, specialists, the do-gooder elites, even Dr. Kalam, if they are stripped of their certificates and the loads of gadgets and left in the forest? How would they sustain? Perhaps they will succeed in running away. According to Peter Principle, a person is elevated to the highest level of her/his inefficiency. Perhaps it may be worth sending all the learned, particularly the bureaucrat, periodically to grassroots for refresher-courses, irrespective of their age and social-political-economic status. It is high time that the entire education systems needs revamp: read for example, Letters and Numbers plus Things to Make (de Souza, R.), which outlines actions to restructure Indian ecucation system. When we give a talk standing on a platform, as Debhoo Ghosh once told us, we assume standards and don’t see what is below the platform.


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Link to "half-woman half-animal" 

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Remigius de Souza