The Madras Institute of Technology
My day started like any other day..I woke up late, skipped breakfast.. blah blah blah…After my morning chores, I walked down my college road to department. As I noticed my surroundings, I began to wonder how much this college has changed over the 4 years that I had been here. Is my college, the famed Madras Institute of Technology that has produced many greats like Dr. Abdul Kalam, deteriorating in standards with each passing day? I just thought, why not analyse?
For the uninitiated, M I T , as it is more commonly known, is one of the constituient colleges of Anna University. It was founded in the year 1949 by a great visionary Mr C Rajam, who wanted to set up a world class engineering institute. Thus was born this great institute, which even inspired the then prime minister Dr Jawaharlal Nehru to build something similar throughout the country, and thus came the IITs. For more information , try Google.
Now, what happened to this college during the course of time is the subject of this post. Where are those great teachers who are supposed to be teaching here? What happened to the state-of-the-art infrastructure? Sadly, the above mentioned aspects do not exist in this college. In the four years that I have been here, things have only changed from bad to worse,if not worst.
Let us consider the faculty here, for instance. I entered my department at a time when most of the better professors where beginning to retire. And what did we get in return? Teachers who couldn’t differentiate between stress and pressure..People who thought they where teaching us something, when infact they were learning from us…Teachers who think that they are God’s incarnations, just because they hold the students grades in their hands..People who have made students, coming here with huge dreams and ambitions, destroy their aims and become one of the ordinary. The teachers who are here do this and more..They do not understand it is their resposibility to inspire and guide the next generation of students..I am not accusing everyone here, but this covers about 80% of the staff at this Institute.
Next comes the facilities and the infrastructure. The college administration, unmindful of the capacity constraints, is increasing the student intake with each academic year. Now, when this college was built, it was designed to hold around 500 students. As of now, this college has around 2000 students inside its campus. But was there any improvement in the infrastructure to cope up with this? Where else will you find a library that has one copy of a book for every 100 students? Poor living standards in the hostels, disgusting food, what not..MIT was known for its green campus. Now all those trees are being felled to make room for buildings and other stuff. Ask our alumni, you might get a better picture of what this college had been , and what it is now. Don’t be surprised if they exclaim ” Are you still using the same multimeter which we used when we were here 20 years back? “. For such is the standard of the infrastructure at this college..It’s true that new stuff are being brought every now and then. But they prove grossly inadequate.
Now its not my aim here to belittle this college, but just to showcase the gross negligence of the standards. True, MIT has one of the best placement records in Tamilnadu. But then, take it from me, the college has, frankly, no part in the students getting placed, except maybe for organising the placement drives. If not for this placement record, MIT would have become ‘ a college that was’ a long time back.
As one of our alumnus once noted ” MIT is living on its past glory “….Very true !
