#342 Andrew Thangaraj: The $5,000 IIT Degree: Can India Fix Its Broken Education System?

What if the most competitive exam in the world is also the most destructive? In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Professor Andrew Thangaraj, faculty at the Department of Electrical Engineering at IIT Madras, to explore how one of India's most prestigious institutions is quietly dismantling the system it helped build. Andrew lays out the honest reality of higher education in India. Two and a half crore kids reach college age every year. Only 90 lakh make it to college. And the IITs, the most coveted institutions in the country, take just 17,000. The competition to reach those seats has become so extreme that students are losing their childhoods, their development is stunted, and even those who make it through are often unemployable because the system rewards knowledge over skills. Andrew walks through exactly how IIT Madras is responding. A full, IIT-branded undergraduate degree in data science delivered entirely online for under five lakhs, roughly $5,000. No JEE required. No elite school background needed. Just a 10th standard foundation and the willingness to do the work. The program flips the traditional model, putting hands-on skills and real projects before theory, building in multiple exit points for students who need to start earning before they finish, and scaling to over 40,000 active students through a hybrid of faculty-recorded lectures, full-time instructors, and a remarkably active student community. We also get into the bigger picture. Why India's AI talent gap is as much a culture problem as a numbers problem. Whether India can leapfrog into AI leadership the way China did after rebuilding its research ecosystem. Where AI tools are already being tested inside the program and where they still fall short. And how AI deployed in Indian languages, in agriculture, and in the courts could drive the kind of societal change that no corporate productivity tool ever will. Subscribe for more conversations with the people shaping the future of AI and emerging technology. Stay Updated: Craig Smith on X: https://x.com/craigss Eye on A. I. on X: https://x.com/EyeOn_AI (00:00) Introduction and Andrew Thangaraj's Background (01:29) India's Higher Education Bottleneck (03:45) Designing a $5,000 IIT Degree (09:27) Why Graduates Still Lack Skills (12:31) When the Program Started and How It Got Approved (13:56) Program Structure, Diplomas and Multiple Exit Points (17:52) Who the Program Reaches and Surprising Student Stories (24:57) Older Students, Working Professionals and International Enrollment (29:55) Can India Leapfrog in AI (34:03) Data Centers, Power and Infrastructure Gaps (40:57) How Involved Are the IITs in India's AI Mission (46:00) AI for Languages, Farms and Courts

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Losing their childhood just for getting into college and then your brain is not developed properly and what do you do after college, right? That's a big question, man. After five years, looking back, looking at all the numbers, looking at where the students are coming out. I think we've really created a low cost, highly scalable, very high quality, vigorous undergraduate degree program, which I think is the need of the art of the country. He didn't have a way back. It's not easy in India to go to this. And he took this program. He did so well in it. His CG is so high, you believe. Then he wrote his gate exam. He topped it. Now he's doing M tech in AI and Indian Institute of Science. So this career and life have changed. I think it's very possible. I'm very hopeful that I think we are the right paper system at this point. My name is Andrew Andrew Sankaraj. As I just be earlier, I'm a faculty here in the Electrical Engineering Department at IIT Middlesbrough.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  I did my bachelor's here from IIT M back in ninety eight. After that, I did a PhD from Georgia Tech in Atlanta in two thousand and three. And then I did a year of postdoc in France and then I got back here as faculty. So two thousand and four, I've been faculty here nearly more than twenty years.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, and that's interesting because one of the things I've been talking to people about is one of the problems India has had. Is that people go abroad for their PhD and they never come back. And so the ITs are thinly peopled by by qualified people.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Yes, IITs are okay. They last year go okay. So maybe I think, given my introduction, then I think we also asked a very relevant question more. How institutes in India find faculty?

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  So if you look at how higher education works in India, it's a very interesting spread of things. So the IITs are few in number of about twenty three today. A large number of students do not go to IITs, right?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Every year about two and a half crores, I'm going to say in crores, I think you should convert to millions. So down two and a half, two more kids come off college going age every year. And about eighty seven, ninety lakh actually get to college.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  So that's our enrollment ratio is over twenty seven percent or so. The southern states do much better.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  Fifty plus, Kamala does fifty six, Kerala is close to sixty. Then if you go to the northern states, they're really good. So it's a lot of kids don't go to college. And even among the ninety lakh that goes, one lakh is like a hundred thousand.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  And one crore is ten.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  So ninety lakh is like nine.

• 2:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, ninety lakh kids go to college and I A Ts every year take only, you know, uh seventeen thousand, eighteen thousand, that's right, right? And even if you look at after I A Ts, what, right? So then you have the N A Ts, Institutes of National Importance, together, even they don't take that many. The number only comes to fifty thousand.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  So a large number of students end up going to small institutions, which we call colleges. We call them colleges, they're not universities, they are affiliated to universities. That's how India works in higher education. The big name, well reputed, good institutions are few in number. And secondly, because they are few in number, they are either fiercely competitive for getting admission or they are very expensive. Now, once it becomes fiercely competitive, that is also an expense. You have a lot of money to get there. So today, any education today in India is want a good reputed college to give you an undergraduate degree. It's really very expensive.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  So in our terms, you would say at least twenty five, thirty lakhs is what you spend. A lakh again, if you keep converting, I'm talking in rupees again. So that's pretty high for India. So, and a lot of interesting other things are there. Even though I A Ts take very few undergraduate students, they are very heavily funded by the ministry. Ministry funds the I A Ts very heavily.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  So all this was okay, it was going on for quite a while, but then they reached different stages of economic growth, the nineties, the boom through I T and all that. And a lot of colleges, a lot more colleges came up for engineering particularly. And then now, I think there is this second sort of stage where maybe AI and data science and M L are going to dominate and we need many more engineers to know how to deploy these systems, understand these systems. So that seems to be the next stage that we are at. So maybe at this point, there is an opportunity for the I A Ts to deliver a program. That maybe is not so expensive. And they say expensive, both in terms of the competition, the intense competition that students go through.

• 4:44Speaker 00

  The intense competition itself, if you look at Kota, for example, and even other places, it's worse than Kota in some sense. It's become very inhuman in some sense.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  So really competitive students are losing their childhood. And then just, just for getting into college and then you, you, you, your brain is not developed properly and what do you do, what do you do after college, right? That's, that's a big, big question mark. So we really wanted to break this stronghold we have because of numbers and resources and limitations. And can we do a full slash U G degree for under five lakhs? That's like under five thousand dollars. Can we do a good, highly reputed, quality U G degree? The students who come out are really skillful, employable, they will go out and make a name for themselves, put the I T brand behind it, right?

• 5:34Speaker 00

  So you can do a very low cost degree and not put a heavy brand behind it. So can you put the I T brand behind it? And still deliver a five thousand dollars, just in five lakh, let's say, right, degree in India? Is that possible or not? It's a great question that came up four, five, six years ago. And a bunch of us, we are talking about, a group of us sat down and thought about it and debated it. And I think today we have created something like that. And after five years, I can say that. I'll give you more numbers as we go along, but after five years, looking back, looking at all the numbers, looking at where the students are coming out.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  I think we've really created a low cost, highly scalable, very high quality vigorous undergraduate degree program, which I think is the need of the art of the country.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw some advertising.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  A similar program at I T Jharkhand. Is this idea spreading now?

• 6:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Gohati has a program like this, Jharkhand is starting a program like this, Patna is starting a program like this. But I think it's still early days in the sense that I think I T met us because of the pioneering nature of many other things we have done in online education and all that earlier. We had a bit of an advantage and I think we know a lot of secrets and lots of things about how this works, how this model works. And I think our model is working really well today. The other institutes are learning and I think if they are interested, they may do. I'm still waiting for some of the older, more famous I T's to act in this regard. So maybe if they do and if they do, that would be a really huge next.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, ultimately, given that it's online, it's not geographically.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  Fixed, it could be.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Combination of.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Half of I T's.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  So even our nature, like I mentioned, because of our earlier experience in online education. In our program, we have teachers from all across the country.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I see.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Many other I T's, the faculty from other I T's teach in this program. So they contribute in so many interesting ways. So that that way it's become a very unique and very interesting program.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, two things struck me on my interview so far. One was that a significant number of I T graduates are unemployed. I'm not sure why, that's what I was told. That's last year.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  What you said, that is entirely true. I think, uh, I don't, I won't say unimp, I think, see. Uh, if the, the way we put out our fraction of students who actually got a job and all that is, uh, is, is a little complicated. You surely understand those numbers well, but I wouldn't say a large fraction of I T graduates are going out. Absolutely not.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Maybe through the regular placement on campus, we, we, there is a smaller number that's there. And I think that is a small number that's still looking for a job when they are able to graduate. And that is probably true, but I don't think at least in the older I T's, the, the number is that large or alarming or something like that.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the other thing that struck me was in the AI mission, Mr. Singh was talking about there it remains a huge gap in the number of qualified uh and now engineers and whatever you want to call them and the projected need to

• 8:58Speaker 00

  yeah

• 8:59Speaker 01

  execute the plans that they have.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  So I imagine is that in your mind as well?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. I think and but but I I think if you look at it, look at that point also a bit absolutely right. So I think the number of CS-based degree programs around computer science, the number of degree programs they have today is skyrocket. Almost every college that I spoke about today, the engineering colleges pretty much teach only computer science.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, the mechanical, civil and all is sort of laid down on a very small number. So the number of people with computer science oriented, ML or AI or BS degrees is increasing. And but then the difficulty in Indian education system is it's they're not somehow a very skill focused from from school. There is like a, I think maybe it's a societal thing. I don't know. Somebody has to study this more closely. But I think generally the there is there is knowledge and other things are valued. And people who work with their hands, get things done. It's maybe a societal tendency from long ago. It's like we don't look at that as respectfully as we would look at us. Look at someone who's sitting down and thinking this, right?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  So I think so, so, so our education system is geared towards knowledge and not so much towards skills, the hands-on skills. And that shows quite often. So you'll have a lot of people graduating with PTEC in computer science. And you'll be shocked to see that they can't get a piece of code to run in a computer. Right? Which you would think is like the essential basic skill. They may write the code up in a piece of paper and do it. Then what good is that, right? So I think this is a this is a recurring theme across all the entire Indian educations. So maybe the people in the Indian AI mission really what they mean is we may have a lot of graduates, but employable graduates who can be deployed into projects and can execute on the ground.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  That is a big issue. So in our program, for instance, we have done something very different. In fact, I can confidently say very few degree programs in the country do that. So we do a foundation part, which happens in the beginning, about a year or so, eight months later. And once students finish that, we do a diploma part. We call it explicitly a diploma part. And it is focused completely on skills. They learn quite a few credits in that part and it's very demanding. There are four projects that they have to execute hands-on. Build two apps, show that the app runs, build an ML model, show that they understand what it is and do that. Then one more ML oriented. So two ML projects, two application development projects.

• 11:31Speaker 00

  They have to do hands-on and demonstrate. So we put that as part of it first. Then after that, they learn the theory in the later levels, a little bit more in detail. So, so we've done a good combination of foundations and skills and focused on skills. We want to have skill-based outcomes as essential part of this degree program. So that is one, another innovation that we did, which is not talked about so much, but it's, I think, an important part. So why, why this program is, this is, I think, likely to succeed. Yeah. And when did the program start? First batch of admission was in twenty one JAR. And the conceptualization and all of that was late twenty nineteen. Formal approval was twenty twenty in the ATM Senate.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  Because you have to understand for an IIT to offer a degree, undergraduate degree, without GE. It's like, what is a good comparison? I think I had one faculty tell me, you know, Stanford will not do community coach. So I think it was, it's like, I don't know how to describe it. I think that it is a very significant move. For them to do something different and that is responding to the societal need in a positive way and all of that. There is this big ivory tower that people have built and put the IITs in talk of. So, so we had to really talk to a lot of people. So that took a lot of time convincing everybody that give us a shot at this program. We'll show you how to run a program, which doesn't, doesn't have a sharp feature at the end. Where it will have a funnel, the funnel will operate. I'll show you how the funnel operates.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  We admit more people, keep it fat. As long as they spend enough time pick up the spins, let them funnel through. Not everybody is going to make it.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  But let's have the, let's have the strength of the exit. Let's have a strong filter of exit and not at the entrance. I think today you would see that all the numbers show that. They show that this is really hard.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. How long is the program?

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a tough question to answer. So nominally four years, the number of credits as a four-year program. The entire B S degree, but we have a lot of intermediate exits. I spoke about the diploma exit in the middle, right? So that's particularly important because when you keep, when you want, the financially less privileged folk to come in and do a program like this. They can't put away five years of their lives and then study and then go to work. Doesn't work for them. It's just this period. Even, even if we give out five thousand degree, it doesn't work. It wasn't has serious issues at home. Somebody has to feed somebody. It doesn't work at all. So they have to start working. So that's why the skills first is very important.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  So at the end of the diploma, many of our students get internships, small jobs, coding, maybe packing work, not so great, but still pays them some. And that helps them survive in school. So there is a diploma exit. There's also a three-year degree exit. Then there's a four-year degree exit. Uh nominally four years, but what we're seeing on average, the foundation is about one year. Students are taking on average one year. The diploma, which we thought to be two years, is actually going to nearly three years, two and a half to three years. So students are struggling. Like I said, the Indian system is not focused on skills. We don't push the skills part two, which is that the diploma tests the skills.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  So it does the exact same thing. It's harder for people to do. So they take long and projects are incredibly strong funds. They really funnel up those who can sit down and do stuff for their hands. So it's, that's important. And then after that, once they finish the diploma, they find the degree level smooth sailing. They finish it off in a year. So the fastest students, really bright ones, are finishing it in three and a half to four years. And the more average level seems to be four and a half, four and a half. So.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Right. But it's, there's no, uh. Cut offs like.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  No, we don't cut them off. We cut them off at eight years.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  Eight years, yeah.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. So people are going to graduate. We had more than thousand graduates at the BS level already in the first few batches. And every term, we're expecting about five hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five hundred types. It's increasing slowly.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 00

  And I think they will graduate about thousand, thousand five hundred people in the four year degree every year.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the requisites for coming into the program, one of those.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  So those also we thought about, Cassie. Once again, the focus was we want to reach the financially less privileged. Kids who didn't go to great schools. See, that's, I think, even in the US, that's true. If you are in a city, go to a great school district and you see, and you think there's an offer. If you go to one, I mean, even in Atlanta, that was true. I mean, move from experience, go to an urban place like Atlanta and go to a normal government, public school there. Really, things are not there. I mean, you're not taught. And I think then you don't get AP classes. You don't get any of these things. This is true in the US and it's doubly true in India. You don't get everything you want if you don't go to a great school. So we wanted to make sure that we can reach anyone. That's the move. The second thing is, given the importance of data for society going forward, we cannot have only engineers do data.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  We need lawyers, we need doctors, we need humanities folks, we need everyone doing this. So we wanted to reach that crowds. So we decided we will do a strong foundation and assume only math and other things at what we call the tenth standard levels, like the sophomore year of school. And after that, students tend to specialize a little bit in school here in India. So after ten standard, so till ten standard, it's commonly there. And we said we will assume only that. The, what we need after that, smart data science, we will develop a farness of program. So we're not relying on the fact that kids went to great schools and all that, or they studied physics, chemistry or something in twelve standard. We don't rely on any of that.

• 17:07Speaker 00

  They can study whatever they want. We will build it here and they come in and that's all they will.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the, uh, uh, so, so right now at any one time, how many students are appropriate?

• 17:21Speaker 00

  So right now, I think there are more than forty thousand active students.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  It across various levels, but you have to understand, I think there's a funnel operating.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Funnel, I'm giving you the total count, it doesn't mean like forty thousand will graduate.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you were saying you graduate each year, what did you say?

• 17:37Speaker 00

  It looks like best projections, right? Now is about thousand to thousand five hundred a year in the four year B S. But in the diploma level, we'll be much larger, remain the few thousands.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Few thousands will graduate in the diploma level, but in the four year degree level, probably thousand to thousand.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've taken, I took Andrew Wynn's Coursera course and it relies heavily on. Uh T A's, on teachers assistants to interact with the students.

• 18:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  How do you scale that here?

• 18:07Speaker 00

  So that's an important part of our program, right? So we have faculty at I A T's are incredibly busy, as in fact, I A T's end up attracting very good quality faculty. So they end up having large research groups and they contribute a lot in so many different process. So they can't be handling large cases, and not at this level, not online, you know. So what we do, which is similar to what many U S universities do, so a lot of U S universities have researched tenure track faculty, and then they have teaching staff. So we have hired people who we call instructors, these are the full time staff. Many of them are P H D's, masters, graduates from I A T's and other institutes, very top institutes. Maybe they didn't want to go into industry, they want to be in teaching, but they can't, maybe they are not.

• 18:52Speaker 00

  That great that they could get into tenure track research position, so then what can they do? You know, if they want to be a good teacher, so we found so many good people like that and we hired them as instructors. Instructors actually interact with students and help translate the content. In a way that students can understand, sit down, solve problems within the foundation level. For every course, there is eight hours of live sessions every week that these instructors do. So students can come in, ask questions, get doubts clarified, the numbers are large, maybe your voice is not heard, but you can, you know. Wait, actually eight hours is a long time.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Sure, and when you say live, do you mean uh online or?

• 19:31Speaker 00

  So there are counted lectures are done by the faculty, like, and then the instructors do it online, like.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  For scaling the class because as long as you could find enough instructors to have all those teams, you could scale.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I think there there's lots of interesting dynamics here. The first thing is students in the online program, we imagine they're isolated and they're sitting in front of the computer and all that. So we wanted to break that also. So we do a lot of student government activity, even though it's an online program. There are students are put into houses, you have twelve houses named after the forests of the country. And then the houses have their own internal structure, their elected leaders and all that. And then there are clubs and societies in the students form. And these clubs and societies always meetups in different parts. So yeah, actually, students in the nearby areas come and meet up there. And every year they do an on-campus event, which is called Paradox.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Uh, Paradox because it's an online program, because it's a on-campus event. And the students run that program. So it's a weeks program. Students have the program all across the country coming to campus. Because it's the summer and students are not here. So they come into campus, they do sports events, they do cultural events, they do technical events. And that's the place where they meet each other. And then they go back and they stay in touch. And then there are student groups, all sorts of interesting student groups that get formed. And then they just talk to each other, they help each other study. So that dynamic is is something that we actively see that in some way. But we can't control every aspect of it. That's something that they have to do on their own. And that's very vibrant and alive.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  And I would say that's a crucial critical part. It's not like every instruction is coming from us. And that doesn't work. Anyone who's done teaching will know that in this belief that what I'm saying is going directly into their hearts and minds, it just doesn't work. They have to go outside of the class, talk to each other, interact, debate, and this, that's when things get solidified. And that's happening.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  That's happening in a very interesting way, uh, student-driven way. That's also a very important reason.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Georgia Tech has, I think, the first online masters. Little interesting aside, I applied and was rejected.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  I was shocked. I've never been rejected from anything, but I didn't have the.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Necessary computer science background.

• 22:03Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  But what have you, do any of the students go on to that program or other online masters programs?

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Not necessarily online, many of them even go to campuses for masters programs. So, so last, last year, if I know this year, there is a admission for the masters programs at I A T S and I A C and all top institutes. It's through an exam called GATE and that is a national level exam, people all across the country, right? This last year, out of the top ten ranks, three ranks were students.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 22:35Speaker 00

  So, and what the first ranker, the all India rank one, as we call him, he is actually a doctor. So he did N B B S from A I N S, which is the top medical college in the country. After two or three years, he figured out he doesn't want to be in service, doesn't want to do doctor stuff. So he wanted to go back to tech, but then he didn't have a way back. It's not easy in India to go to distance and he took this program, he did so well in it, his C G is so high, believe. Then he wrote this GATE exam, he topped it, now he's doing M tech in A I and Indian Institute of Science. So his, his career and life have changed and I think something similar is, those are the sort of amazingly interesting stories, the student stories of this program.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  That's just unbelievable that there's a filmmaker in Kolkata, he is actually a filmmaker and he's a young kid only. This filmmaker, he did a program. He's initially, he didn't get a high C G P A, but he understood enough, he made a lot of friends. Now he runs a company which does A I production and all this stuff for movies.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  And he runs a company, it's, it's, it's sitting right here that is doing all that. So, oh, I, I can tell you stories like this about these students and I think that's also a part of it. So coming back to your question, yes, many students are doing P C programs in India and abroad.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Many have gone to the U S, the U K, Germany, all of that.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, with this doctor, they said the filmmaker is very young, but do you have older students coming back?

• 24:00Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, there's no age to met. Uh, the oldest student we had for a while was eighty plus. Actually, I don't know, it was really hard to support him, but I think, I don't think he finished it. But quite a few in the sixties.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:14Speaker 00

  And thirties and forties also is quite a few, but of course, the large majority is under thirty. But fifteen percent of the people in the program are actually working in companies. So that's a pretty large number as well. So that's another interesting dynamic. So these student groups I spoke about invariably has one who's thirty, one, one member who's thirty years or forty years old. Then there are those who are younger and that person is working in a company. And that group and the dynamic it has, I think has no equal anywhere else. Even if you go to a physical university, you're not going to find a peer group which has an older person and a younger person. And then there is, you say something and that person says, you know what, that's not how life works. Eventually things change after you have met, or you know, and all these conversations are also happening.

• 24:59Speaker 00

  So that is also a very interesting group.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And what about international?

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Uh, so that number is not very large. I think about three hundred and fifty or close to four hundred students outside of India. A, a large group among them are Indian experts, not Indian from India who are living in, provide at various space. A, a small number is actually a foreign citizen outside the country. I think the U S is maybe around twenty five or thirty, not sure of the number, it's not very high. It's more under fifty.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And how are those people discovering you and also international? So.

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Thirty or so from the West, do you have Chinese students? Do you have Japanese students? Do you have Thai students?

• 25:44Speaker 00

  I, I don't know, I don't know the spread. I don't think that spread internationally is really very small. Like I said, my large majority is in the Guls.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Guls from Singapore is a small number. Yeah, a lot of Indian folk there and that's all we did. And we don't reach anybody else, you know, ordinary without publicity at first. We don't do serious publicity as such, definitely not international, we are not focused on that.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in terms of growing, are you with capacity or?

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Ah, that's a good question. I think we get a more. Every year these days we get about forty to forty five thousand applications. And out of the applications, there is a smart process by which people get in and then all of that. I think those applications can grow up to hundred thousand and be okay. I don't think that's going to worry us too much up to that. Beyond that, maybe it will reach some sort of a limit, have to have to wait and see. But I I think you really have a team. When you see what we have here, you can see there are some people in the team you can meet. Some incredibly capable people they've managed to attract into the program for various reasons. I think there's a social cost that pulls people in. There is, it's okay monetarily also, we compensate them quite well.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  But then there is this overwhelming pull that you can make a big difference to society as a whole. That brings in a lot of fantastic people and those people have no limits, you can tell you, they're not afraid. Many of them are women, they have no fear at all. Academics like me, you'll be afraid of these numbers in projects on one lack and all that. And they'll stand up and say, just this shows the numbers, we don't really care.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Seems to be that.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, at the beginning, I was talking about how you came back ultimately to teach. And that there's a dire need for India's AI advancement and diaspora. Come back after the PhDs. Was there a specific reason or was it just personal preference?

• 27:43Speaker 00

  For me, oh, okay. So see, my family, almost my entire family is in India. Nobody has gone from there. In fact, my parents didn't go to college, me and my sister, my family, it was a sister. So we became a little bit more, much more tied to India than anything else. Well, it's not necessarily the reason, but for me, coming back and teaching in India was always a good thing. And after graduate, this was clearly there, so it was an easy decision. But I think quite a few people come back. It's not that they don't come back, but it's a complex issue, right? At that time, at that age to decide really want to be here. So it's a complicated decision to make. And I think, who knows?

• 28:20Speaker 00

  I mean, today, the world is a complicated place as well, with the politics and and how people are reacting to the digitalized world is also changing.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  So who knows? Maybe there may be a few more years where you want to come back, you'll see.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. The other thing, just generally, AI, India's AI mission to ultimately, according to Instagram, should catch up with the US and China.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Uh. I heard an interesting analysis from Professor Nelson, I did know he. Um. He was talking about China because China's higher education system was completely destroyed in the sixties. Um. Uh, I started going to China in nineteen eighty and it was, I think, seventy nine is when they reopened the universities and the first people were going back. And so their higher education system was incredibly weak. Um. Throughout the eighties and nineties. Um.

• 29:21Speaker 01

  And then the government at a certain point had the resources to start investing in research and attracting talent back. Um. The Chinese nationals who have moved abroad. Uh, which is fine, but they were so far behind everybody in AI certainly. And then generative AI happened. Well, first neural networks. Uh, but then generative AI, quick succession, two thousand twelve, two thousand seventeen. And by then they had enough of a, uh, population of qualified researchers.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  That they could jump on that and leapfrog and, and, um, uh, the, the, the time that they had lost and now they're, uh. Um, competitor in the United States, you know, uh. Uh, do you think India has a chance for that kind of, uh, you know, if you can build up your. Yeah, you have, well, you have the human resources. Um. If you can invest in the infrastructure and as AI is inevitably going to go through another breakthrough. And you'll be at the top of the game now.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  I think it's possible, uh at least from my point of view at the undergraduate level, we are producing good people now.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Definitely the bosom much larger, uh but suppose it's something like deep sea to happen. I think, I think yesterday we were having a debate in that department about this and somebody was saying that deep sea. There was a chance that it could have happened even in India.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Right. So I'm not sure if I've spoken to some of the Kishka who's here, he was named and times A I list the top hundred influences etc. So he runs a pretty big AI mission here in I T markets. This company called Sarvam, which is trying to build a foundation model or that. And it's just a, it's a, it's a sequence of random things you have to tie down together to have a successful company and a product on that like. I think we're very close. I think there's lots of work that's happening. We'll fill it all line up and to result in that. Even the next big thing happens, we'll key get there. I think it's very possible. So let's, I'm very hopeful that I think we have the right people system at this point.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  But I think comparing India with China is a bit complicated. You said, you know, China very well and I think the money flows, the investment flows there. It's very different from how money flows here, the regulation, the uh uh codes and the structure and rights we have and all of these. Enter the picture and

• 32:12Speaker 00

  having said all of that, I'm still hopeful. The next big breakthrough that happens, we'll have a product to there that actually complete.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:19Speaker 00

  And

• 32:20Speaker 01

  And a lot of it depends right now on building a a data center capacity. Is that right?

• 32:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So I think th- those things happen. That's been the trick, that's right. And we'll be put up on nuclear power station, power, couple of data centers very quickly. Very quickly is very hard in India. You try anywhere in India now, if you start the discussion of having a nuclear power plant, this could be huge protest and

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  And it's, it's very hard to convince people either way that this will work, that will work and all of that. So that's one issue. I don't know how that's going to get solved. Maybe we'll solve it. Maybe we'll use solar, maybe we'll use something else for it.

• 32:59Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  That needs to come up and then who's going to invest in that data center is I think is it going to be the Googles and the Open AIs of the world or it's going to be an Indian grown company, it's going to do that. Is it is are we going to be able to act together in one unified way? Is there some tipping point? It's waiting.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow. Well, so that you're an optimist about this India AI mission.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, how that's been.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, reasonably optimistic in motive. Let's try it.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and where do you see more broadly, I mean, not talking about undergraduate, but where do you see India's strengths in research? Just looking across the research landscape here.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Hmm, oh, that's a tough question.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Oh, maybe.

• 33:50Speaker 00

  So I'll answer, I'll answer specifically to IT midruss, right?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Uh, if you look at IT midruss, I think every department has a few researchers who are well known globally. There is, there's no doubt about it. I mean, they're they have seen as some of the leading lights in the the global research societies in that area. It's no doubt about it. In every department, you're fine, one for sure. I think the same is probably true if you compare, let's say, the US system, Chinese system. Just that the number and the size of the departments are much larger there. And by by by that, by same extension, they have more people who succeed at that level.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And I think they they they are at a point where they're seeing one or two such good people in in a department of, say, thirty, forty. Maybe when the department sizes grow even. Grow even more, we will have a little bit more of a critical mass of such people. And I think after that, we may compete with the US and China and maybe, I don't know, US and China are hard. At least the European countries will start competing a little bit better, right?

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, the you mentioned work on.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Local foundation models.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Who's doing more work?

• 35:11Speaker 00

  So there is a company called Sarwam, Sarwam S A R B A, which is trying, it's not, I don't know if they have a foundation model that's out for anybody to see. They have the ambition to do that and let's see, let's see how that works. So I think they work closely with the India AI mission as well. The India AI mission will know that.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you mentioned also a professor here.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Mitesh Kapra.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Kapra.

• 35:34Speaker 00

  So you can check it out. He was named in the Times AI Influencers list, the top hundred.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, man. Although as a journalist, I'm always skeptical because they're journalists that they are.

• 35:46Speaker 00

  No, but I know him. He runs a pretty big project for A S of Bharat.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  AI.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  A I N B O S U Bharat.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  And it's pretty interesting. So he's trying to create data sets for Indian languages.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  And very interesting things.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And hopefully, as I said, I spoke to I B I mean, uh. Dang, blower, the top tech powers, commercial companies are, have operations here or hiring people.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Do they give, that could be a two edged sword because on the one hand, they give support to, to research, academic research institutions. The other side, they're taking people away from the academic institutions without saying anything controversial. What's your view on that?

• 36:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that it, it, it goes both ways. I think at some level, as a researcher, if, if you want to be in a university teaching, you have to like interacting with students.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 00

  So you have to be, to really enjoy being around students, enjoy the process of transforming them into something, that process you have to enjoy. And if you don't. Uh, then university might be a good place to do research, but you won't enjoy it to the fullest extent possible. And I know many who have applied to even I A T M, our own department, and then ended up in Google Research or Microsoft Research. Because that's, that's definitely more lucrative than being in academia, or even though the salaries these days are not too bad and, you know, as well, reasonable, not that salarious those guys. But I think that critical missing element is, do you interact with students? Do you enjoy that interaction? Do you see that as a positive aspect to your life?

• 37:27Speaker 00

  That is not there, then I guess people go there. So at least I don't see them necessarily negatively. Uh that's okay. It's I think it's a two way street. Some of them quit jobs there and come here as well. That happens to us.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's interesting because in a way, India, as you said during the I T phase, became the back office for the the world's corporations.

• 37:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but will we take the lead and any new research and build a cutting edge product which is out there? So that's something that's I think of examples in other areas that I think I'm trying to think of. T V S, for instance, there are Indian companies which put out cars which look at least to be, I would say, the best move is maybe to bring in the competitive products out there. Uh so will we do that in this area is a great question. I think, let's see, I think people more powerful than me are working on it also. I know of. Let's hope something will come today.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in terms of the India A I mission or the national program to advance A I. How involved is are the I A Ts in that?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  I think they're quite strongly involved. I think Mitesh, for instance, Mitesh Kapak, I keep mentioning his name. I think he's involved. Quite a few people in our data science department and others are involved. I'm not directly involved with them. I got to know both them recently in the context of something else. And more of a with the more on the A I education side, not so much on the A I development side.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  So well, another example, speaking of A I education, are you using much A I in the program?

• 39:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that's the context in which I got to learn about all these India A I mission. So we do have some bots on the on our portals. We're beginning to experiment with them. A coding assistant, I think there's an interview bot which interviews students and all that. Beginning to experiment with that and I think that will also help us scale better with the support that students need to study remotely. I think the bot is a very effective way of doing it. They're experimenting a little bit about it with with that. But there is some, the issue I see for large scale deployments, then I have to deploy it for ten thousand users, twenty thousand users. It's not as cheap as internet or something, right?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:52Speaker 00

  It's a high cost. And the second thing I see is it makes quite a few errors. In the fraction of times it makes errors goes to the minutes, I think ten to fifteen seems to be the number these days. For critical tasks, like for instance, one task.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Ten to fifteen percent?

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Percent, yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Ah, that's high, yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Because I think some of the critical tasks we tried was we have coding assignments, so students code, write a piece of code. And we can always evaluate it with test cases, but then it'd be nice to have an A I read that code and then give some comments on. Know what was right, what was wrong, what could be changed, etc. And we found in our experiments, ten to fifteen percent of the times it makes mistakes. So quite often it's right, I mean, from eighty percent it's right, it's pretty high, but when you want to deploy it and scale it for ten thousand people.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  That ten percent will hurt you. So that's the limitation. So these, I think, are the two limitations. One is the cost and I think the energy it consumes is really high. Then the error rate, I think it has to come down below five, I think, to my knowledge, I think, below five percent, it's like a.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Have you, uh, do you use any of the commercial O P I?

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think the, we don't do it directly. We have companies that help us out with it. And I'm sure they are using foundation models, or possibly OpenAI or anything else, uh, foundation models, they pay us. And they do some fine tuning on that.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I interviewed Arvind, uh, Srinivas, the founder of Plex. Is he involved at all in?

• 41:31Speaker 00

  He's an I A T M grad, I think.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Uh, I T, which?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Madras.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Madras, is that right?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, so he offered the complexity for free for all I A T M students, including the B S data science students.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Really?

• 41:44Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, so students are using complexity quite.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  I use it very heavily. Uh, yeah, well, that's wonderful. And but even perplexity, the error rate on code review is too high.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  At last time we checked, it was that maybe we should do that.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and everything's advanced.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  It's advancing. So we did it about maybe two, four and a half years ago. So we'll try it again now.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  But but I think it's not zero, definitely. If it if it comes to around five percent, we'll be very happy. But you're doing specific tasks, you know.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  So there is a coding assignment, just a particular question. Some students have the right code for it, and we want to give you back on that piece of code to the student, right? That is a very specific task. And then those kind of things, when you do it repeatedly, they're like, we are interested in getting that.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, although I I I've been traveling, but it seems OpenAI has announced some advancement on reducing hallucinations.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  The, yeah, this whole idea of A I for education fascinates me because in the U S, which is what I think of, but certainly in India, there are so many uh, students that don't have access to quality education. And if there were really a system that was reliable, certainly, most students aren't going to stick with it. But motivated students will. Do you think about that? Is that something?

• 43:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think that's something we're definitely looking for.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Looking to build some sort of a teaching assistant type board, which should be very good. Like that's something, I don't think there's a product like that. I don't know if we can, I mean, we can certainly use it, we can pay for it. I don't know if we can develop it on our own, if we actually should do that.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, maybe you can just talk generally about.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  How you see A I advancing in India and impacting the Indian society? This is my first trip to India. I've read a lot about India, watched a lot of movies and videos about India, but it's different being in a place. And it's a very complex society. And being here, uh, certainly, certainly, after coming from a world where I'm listening to uh, A I pundits pundits and researchers who are always looking five to ten years ahead, you get very excited about the future. But when you come back down to the ground and you look at society, you wonder.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, A I can speed up corporate processes, no doubt. But how is A I going to help all of these people struggling to make a living in this very complex society? Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 44:50Speaker 00

  It's a great question. It's a very sort of global question.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. It's way beyond India.

• 44:58Speaker 00

  So I think in in the Indian context, there's a lot of fear that the I T backend jobs will go away.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  And the I T backend jobs lifted a huge section of our society out of poverty. And then, you may not, even if you said out of poverty, at least brought them to a much higher income bracket than most previously thought possible. I think that happened a lot. But there is that fear that those jobs will go away, but there are also people reassuring everyone that other type of backend jobs will come in A I systems. Somebody has to maintain the A I systems that are there. It's everywhere and we will get there and we will educate next time. Maybe we'll we'll know that. That's one part of it. Yes, I agree. The corporate processes will become better. I think a lot of other issues in the country, it's if you look at India fundamentally.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  One, I'm not sure if you read about it, but the South was this North divide is a pretty significant. So historically, the South was a little isolated from all the things that were happening there. And that's one part of it. And secondly, I think the early, immediately after independence, the early chief ministers that had a political. They had, they were really visionaries and they invested a lot in spreading education. At sports level education, started a lot of schools, came up with a scheme by which people got food for free, schools, et cetera. Why am I saying this? Because the situation in the South is generally dramatically different.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  You can take any number, you can look at maternal mortality ratio, infant mortality ratio, you can look at the cross implementation. Any significant statistic, the southern states, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra, Maharashtra, including those states. Way better than many of the northern states. So the key northern states are a little bit behind. So significantly behind in many of these numbers. Why am I saying that? I'm saying, so, so now, some of these systems have to get replicated elsewhere. It's education, you can take education, and you need a very good working school system, right? And people have to believe in that system. They should believe that when you go to school, you get good education.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Then you go to college, you have to actually learn, then do something there and then your life becomes better. So that kind of belief in that system has to come. That is, in my opinion, not there in the, in many states in the country, in large numbers. There is pockets where it's there, but it's not spread out. And that's where you see the big difference, not like the South was like advanced significantly beyond the wealthier states. But still, it is noticeably better. I'm not sure if it's a move which you've traveled, but you'll see that it's noticeably better. So, so I think the advancements of many of the states can get short circuited.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  If we deploy A I wisely, correctly, and if A I actually advances in making that better. Like for instance, a lot of work that they're doing in doing A I for Indian languages. Yeah. Doing A I in Indian languages, how to convert, how can some farmer living in some small village? Ask a question and get answers from A I. All of these kind of things is very interesting. So if those things get deployed really in an intelligent way, then kids get educated better. Farmers do their jobs better, they can grow things better.

• 48:31Speaker 00

  And more importantly, I think the justice system, the courts in India famously clog all sorts of crazy ways. If the justice system gets better because of A I, then I think fundamental societal change can happen. Or to many things. So that's the dream as such will happen or not related. Okay.