Management guru stresses to identify excellence for progress

Identifying people with potential for excellence and nurturing them for bigger achievements is the key to building great institutions. This is what Prof Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad and Executive Vice-Chair of the Department of Science and Technology’s National Innovation Foundation (NIF) had to say to a group of faculty members at the Symbiosis International University during his visit to Pune in January. Gupta, a Padmashree awardee, is widely regarded for his extensive contribution to securing recognition and respect for grassroots inventors and innovators.

He is credited, among other things, for having created the largest-ever database of over 1.40 lakh innovations and traditional knowledge practices from across India and securing 20,000 patents for grassroots inventors and innovators. “We must create processes where people who are brighter and smarter than us get easily identified and pursued in a way so as to evolve as achievers,” he said. This does seem close to what Rajkumar Hirani’s film ‘3 Idiots’ has to say, doesn’t it? According to Gupta, the need for such processes was more crucial for those engaged in the profession of teaching, since teachers often get the first chance of identifying the potential in a student, he said.

“Unfortunately, 99 per cent of teachers, even in institutes of excellence, do not encourage students,” he lamented. “The conventional belief that our students cannot open a new furrow and have to follow the established path of learning is absurd,” he added. Gupta cited his own experience of getting associated with young technology students, who helped him put together 1.04 lakh final year projects by engineering students from across the country, and posting the same on a specially created web-based portal – all by using innovative strategies and low-cost applications.

He also cited the example of four girls from a government polytechnic in Latur coming up with an innovative product that can work as a black box in a car. “The girls couldn’t have done this had not they been encouraged by their teacher,” he pointed out. “It is possible to develop new models of identifying and pursuing excellence among students,” he stated. Gupta further called for evolving new theories of institution building which are not exclusivist by nature and do not promote a system where only the elite are supposed to decide and guide the common individual.

“The IITs and IIMs are great institutions in their own right, but both have limitations in terms of reaching the grassroots where the actual problem-solving has a greater requirement,” he said. In Gupta’s view, institutions of arts and commerce have a great opportunity to move in where the IITs and IIMs cannot. “A close analysis of the growth story in different segments of the Indian economy shows that the growth is coming from those who we have said are not good enough for the IITs and IIMs,” he pointed out.