Citation
Prabhakar, G.P. (2013), "Organizational change, restructuring, innovation, modeling, and industrial linkages: a pioneering engineering institute in India", International Journal of Public Sector Management, Vol. 26 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM.04226aaa.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Organizational change, restructuring, innovation, modeling, and industrial linkages: a pioneering engineering institute in India
Article Type: Interview From: International Journal of Public Sector Management, Volume 26, Issue 1
Further development is possible. In future, other courses can be started and they can be linked with cottage industry where earning and learning can develop hand in hand. This type of education is rare in India. Only one institution is pioneering in this field, namely, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. It has been giving this kind of education, which is called Sandwich Education or Cooperative Education, successfully for some years. Due to such Institute Industry cooperation one is trained to earn livelihood along with studies and there would be no difficulty in getting a job on completion of such courses (Satsangi, 2010).
This paper is based on an interview with Dr S. Venkateswaran (died May, 2010). He was the Director (equivalent to a vice chancellor) of Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, India. BITS started as a paathshaala (local school) in 1901 when there was no school in Pilani. The institute was founded by G.D. Birla in 1929 as an intermediate college. During the Second World War it was converted into an engineering college. Later on in 1964 BITS became a deemed university.
Introduction
Son of a schoolteacher, Venkateswaran did his MSc in Mathematics from University of Madras college in Madurai. Then he started teaching in Madurai. Thereafter he went on to the University of Illinois in 1967 to do a PhD in pure Math. Having finished his PhD he was offered to teach in the University of Illinois but he came back to India and joined BITS-Pilani in 1974. In 1976 he became Dean, probably one of the youngest Deans. This was around the time when restructuring of BITS started. There was an important task of changing a traditional system into a modern system and overnight he had to take decisions on issues including: introduction of continuous internal evaluation, semester system, modular and a flexible educational structure, university-industry linkages, and double degree concept which came much later.
In 1974 the operational procedures in BITS was something like the American system. Americans had a very simple method, if something is wrong and needs to change, it would be completely replaced. This was even suggested which was not possible in BITS Pilani. They had 200 people and the same 200 people have to do the change. One could not remove 200 people and put another 200 people. BITS Pilani did do some recruitment, but anybody who came from outside wanted to live only as an outsider, and could not succeed (Due to Pilanis rural surroundings at that time).
The interview
Interviewer
When and how did the restructuring of BITS-Pilani started?
Venkateswaran
Restructuring cannot be done overnight as this is a transformation which you have to do in a slow but planned process. In 1976 we did an administrative restructuring to sustain the educational reform because anytime you do a change it will be there for some time and then it will vanish. There are many universities where semester system was brought and after two years teachers went on strike. Continuous evaluation was introduced which got removed and people gave all sorts of reasons. Therefore, you have to do some restructuring of administration. Our previous Director C.R. Mitra was a very innovative person; he also wanted to create a participatory method by which you can have a restructuring of educational and administrative structure. So, we did it in an interesting way. We made a number of people participate. I, along with few other younger people (at that time I was only around 35 or 36) went through a process and made a structure, which I think is a good structure, and that helped us to sustain large number of educational reforms. The basic principle of the structure is that you treat the university as an integrated whole and identify functions of the university not just engineering, science etc, not discipline wise.
The functions of a university are: teaching, research, student welfare, and community welfare. The university has to organize its own instruction evaluation properly. It has to create linkages with the industry and it also has to do some proper financial management, purchases. We thought to create these functions. So, there are functions known as instruction, research and consultancy, practice, and educational development etc. Each function will be headed by a Dean, irrespective of, which area he has to teach. For example, a course like thermodynamics can be taught by a physics person, it can be taught by mechanical engineering person, or by a chemical engineering faculty. Usually what we do is that science faculty will look for science person, engineering will look for an engineer. This way you will not be able to optimize and you will not be able to get the best resources. The moment you have an instruction division, immediately he will go and pick up those teachers across the institute and the heads of the departments have no control over their people as an administrator. They have control only in terms of academics. We abolished the concept of departments, and we introduced the concept of groups. So, there will be a mathematics group, physics group, chemistry group and so on.
There were two essential purposes for this restructuring. One is in terms of sustaining and creating reforms and continuing innovative ideas. Second, to do everything in an optimal way because we are not getting government grants at all right from 1964.
Interviewer
Was it despite being a deemed university that you were not getting government funding?
Venkateswaran
No before becoming a deemed university we were getting the funding. The moment we became the deemed university one of the conditions was that we will take care of our funding. That is what GD Birla said that all our maintenance we will do. In the Indian system you get grants for two purposes. One is for normal maintenance, another, is for development. The developmental things are done in India either through the five-year plan funding or through specific projects. The specific projects also will come under planned funding for somebody else, otherwise there is no money available. All the money for development is only through planned funding. We do get all planned funding from the government of India as any other university does, but we do not get any non-planned funding and that we have to generate ourselves.
Interviewer
Was that the initial condition to accept not to get government funding, which was set by GD Birla at that time?
Venkateswaran
There are many advantages for it and of course there is one problem in the sense that every year you have to plan like any other entrepreneur how to balance your budget next year and to be competitive because we have to give competitive salaries to people. There will be some sort of a financial limitation, but many times these limitations are also good because you can innovate only if there are limitations. If you have plenty of things you can never innovate. So, this is one of the things that helped us as we found methods by which we could have a highly optimal usage of our space and we work from morning 8 to evening 6 with a timetable like an American system. We took all the good points of American system. One is to have the timetables chosen by the students. Students will make their own timetable. There is no fixed timetable. We do not tell as soon as a student comes this is your first year timetable; this is your second year timetable etc. The advantage of that is there is no lunch hour. Only human beings require lunch and no other facilities like laboratories. Students can choose their lunchtime, anytime between 11 to 2 and so they make their own timetable and classes also function in all these times so that we have an optimal utilization of more than 70 to 75 percent of the space. The laboratories and the computer center can remain opened up to 12 oclock.
Interviewer
Dont you think this was a unique point because the American model is so much disciplined?
Venkateswaran
The American model is also not like that even though this has been suggested in several American forums. Whenever I go and describe to the American university president, they become overwhelmed and say that, “I wish I had this model because in this model the little emperors are broken. In all university system each person will make his own empire and the whole university systems day-to-day operations depends upon how much each empire grows and how competitive it is with another empire. So, in a way it may be alright, but for a university president it always becomes a problem. What will happen is some may be very good and some will have a problem, and for university everything has to be done properly because I can never be happy if one of our groups has 100 percent good students and 100 percent employment with no complaints, but somewhere else things are not alright.
Interviewer
Was this a kind of structure that was required at that time with the kind of needs that were there?
Venkateswaran
Of course we are not a very big university that way. To some extent it becomes possible; to some extent we had cooperation from the faculty. Normally, everybody may not like it because if you are a well-established university, to bring these types of reforms will be a problem. If you try to do the same things in Delhi University or in Jawaharlal Nehru University or to an American University like MIT, it will be very difficult because people will oppose it. Vested interest will always come in. People will say, “Why should I do it? I am independent. I will do things this way, take it or leave it. At very few places the whole institution will be considered to be an important entity for which you have to worry about. Normally, people will always think about themselves, and then one may think of a group. If you want to grow beyond it then you have to sacrifice something. You can never integrate without sacrificing something that you possess which people may not like to do. We are quite lucky to have done that it here.
Interviewer
When you took over as Director did you have this difficult process of building up the university systems at that time?
Venkateswaran
In 1976 I became the Dean and my previous Director retired. I took over as Director in 1989 when the board took a decision that they will take an internal person for the Directors position. They formed a selection committee. After going through this they thought I should take over. I was not the senior most person in the institute at that time. Our chairman actually convened a meeting of all the Deans and the senior faculty and explained why he wanted me to be the Director and took the consensus of everybody. So, when I took over as Director I had the good fortune of having the cooperation of everyone. People who have been in this institute much senior to me, 20 to 25 years senior, all of them were willing to cooperate.
Interviewer
How would you spell out your vision which you articulated at that time?
Venkateswaran
We were trying to expand and build on executive education industry. It was something like this. We did have a very active linkage with the industries for the training of our own students. We have what is known as a practice school program, in which we want every student to spend at least two months in Summer, after their first two years in an industry in which you will have an exposure for work. Industry is a generic word, meaning wherever development work takes place. It can be a bank, a laboratory, it can even be community work area where active developmental project-based work takes place.
Then in the final year the student spends an entire semester in the industry under the supervision of the faculty. Because the faculty has to supervise we divide the final year student into half-half. First semester one half goes and second semester another half goes. So, your faculty does not come back. He (or she) is continuously stationed there for a few years as an industry interactor. Tests and quizzes are held in the industrial set up. Its like a regular course for a student and it works very well and lot of industries like that. We have sent about 400 to 450 students every semester and their living expenses are paid by the industry and we get more than 500 projects for them, and paid for by the industry. Students have to pay the fees for us because we supervise and conduct his education there. So, this one-year going into the industry also gives us, indirectly, a financial source from the industry. For us of course all the costs of housing the students here and also managing the education are indirectly paid by the industry.
Interviewer
This is a German model, isnt it?
Venkateswaran
The MIT had this model in their chemical engineering department, thats from where we picked it up. They did not do it across the border. After we did it across the border when we went back to MIT in 1990s, I went back and met the MIT president. I described him and others the whole thing. They were surprised and pleased for us. This is true that it is like German model but there is a difference. German model is not completely supervised by faculty. In German model students leave the system, go and work and then come back. Getting a degree at an early age was not essential for a German system.
Interviewer
Is this perhaps the only model of its kind?
Venkateswaran
Yes, this is indigenously developed model and its performance improved every year. Thats one of the important things in the type of change that we were doing, that the system should be of such a nature it should know how to self correct it otherwise the system will not work.
When we were implementing this change not only our faculty but also the people from the industry participated in the Human Resource Development (HRD). In 1991 when the liberalization of Indian economy began the first thing any collaborator would ask us was who our employees were and what HRD plan we had. Those institutes who do not have proper HRD Plan are unlikely to get a good collaborator. So, we did start converting some of the HRD training activities for the industries into a regular degree programs.
Interviewer
What were the other parameters you had to grow?
Venkateswaran
We have to look at the university system right now. It is going through a huge crossroads and its at a very crucial time. One thing is of course financial crunch. The public participation in the education is dwindling which is true especially in higher education. Government input in higher education is not going down but it is the same money and same money means its going down. Increasing the percentage on spending will not work that well because you cannot just increase the spending in education, then you will have to reduce the spending in health, infrastructure etc. Nobody will be able to give a proper distribution, somewhere it will do and somewhere it will suffer etc.
Some innovation has to take place as far as educational operation is concerned, which is one aspect. The second aspect which is more important is that the total educational knowledge components itself is changing very fast and the emphasis is on knowledge capital. Universities will not remain competitive unless they are able to teach modern subjects and introduce new electives every year. It is a very important aspect and there are technologies that will simply vanish within the graduating time span of a student.
People have to assume that change is a must and it is going to take place and you have to get yourself prepared for it. A new system has to be created. Thats what we have done. Every year we are introducing newer and newer subjects and the major problem also is in terms of getting faculty because there are subjects that did not exist yesterday. People have to understand learning is not through a teaching process but learning has to be a collective process in which you are having a shared learning.
A student under teacher at a particular time becomes a group learner and the teacher becomes an enabler. You should not worry whether a person (faculty) has a degree or not; the person should have an interest in it and intelligence for it and also have the necessary tools. This is something that we are incorporating. This challenge is a bigger challenge for which participating in the HRD outside will help because automatically it will plough in to those resources of industry.
Another thing is that this is the only method by which you will know what the outside world needs and what is happening in the outside world, and so immediately some need will come in and somebody will get into it and the people in the practice school will adapt to the requirements.
Opening up to the outside world and development in the off-campus program is not just to generate financial resources, but we have to generate total resources for the development of the entire university system. We are doing it in a very conscious way, and of course other areas like in e-learning, we have to get into it. One of the important things that we are putting up is to create an e-learning environment and using the technology as much as possible for our own development. I always tell my faculty that it is something like a genie in front of you either you can become a slave of it or you enslave it. If you are capable to enslave it then there is no problem, then it will do wonders. The biggest asset for a university is the students, and we have got very bright students. We create a system and put the person in a system in which they go into a particular behavioral pattern that will necessarily make them learn.
Interviewer
What do you think are the strengths of this organization?
Venkateswaran
When I took over as a Director in 1989 our important strength was our educational structure, which was modular and flexible, and our institute had a reasonably good reputation, which has sustained. To summarize, even today an important strength has been our good admission policy, which is purely based on merit. No recommendation of any kind is accepted and our recruitment policy is also purely based on merit. We have a modular and flexible system in which there are no dogmas. Then there is a participatory administration by the entire faculty. Supposing a faculty says that he (or she) wants to introduce a new course, it can be done without any problem and with a very limited bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is required for you to function, but bureaucracy should not be a bottleneck, bureaucracy should be an enabler. So, bureaucracy is done in such a way that it is always an enabler. The change becomes possible without much difficulty and very good teamwork, which is very important. There is no group politics. In many other university systems you will always find group politics. Even if there are 20 people, ten will form one group, and other ten will form another group. There will be a director group; there will be an anti-director group and all those things. In BITS-Pilani there is absolutely no group politics and there is no group politics amongst students also. These are our strengths. Educationally, a very important strength is our relationship with the industries. We have highly established institutionalized linkages with the industry, which is working very well.
Interviewer
What do you think are the weaknesses or the deficiencies which you faced at that time?
Venkateswaran
One of the deficiencies is in the location. Immediately, to get a lot of people to get enthused to come here and spend time is a problem. Because of that not many people are able to get consultancy job work. When you do not get big consultancy work you feel probably you are deprived of something. There are areas where you we to strengthen. There are areas where we have to strengthen and we are yet to reach that peak are in terms of creating research processes of getting into new patterns, new areas etc. From 1989 onwards we have started some new research centers. We introduced the biotechnology area which was not there before and then there are some centers in embedded control systems, centers in networking, software development, and in educational research.
We have also started some collaborative programs with CSIR (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, India), particularly laboratories with CD or micro electronics. The research in the university system has another problem unlike the American system. In American system if a professor gets a research grant say something like $100,000. Then $50,000 dollars goes to the industry, no questions asked. Remaining $50,000 will be spent by the Professor. He cannot take it for his pocket but use it for buying equipment, for travel, giving scholarships etc. In Indian system it is not like that. If you get a research grant in India the grant will specify how much money can be spent on for equipment, number of research scholars and some contingency for travel etc. Now what the university immediately has to do? The moment somebody brings in a few research scholars it has to arrange housing for them, it has to find laboratory space for them, electricity charges etc. So, immediately any research grant brought from any Professor to the university system leads to an additional expenditure compared to the American system. Now of course sometimes some overhead can be put, but still the overhead is not very high in government-based universities.
This is one of the weaknesses in the private universities that how to manage the grants and you also cannot allocate huge money for the research work because that much money will not be there. You cannot collect money from the undergraduate students for tuition fees and allocate it for research to somebody else, students will not accept it. You cannot also charge fees from PhD and Masters students because most of them come here in expectation of scholarships or a stipend that we have to provide. So, this is something for which we also expect the industries to participate and it is also one of the areas that we are discussing with the industries. Some industries have come up and set up laboratories. Like IBM, Cisco Systems, Motorola etc. have set up very good laboratories and are also giving research fellowships. So, this is one of the things that we are trying to do and then we have to go to the alumni.
Interviewer
Are there any specific organizational changes that you are planning?
Venkateswaran
No, right now we have started a campus in Dubai. The Government of India says that we should export education and so we went ahead and started a campus in Dubai.
Interviewer
What kind of a structure shall you have, which looks at the future strategy and planning?
Venkateswaran
I still feel that functional administration is going to be useful and probably will be essential; otherwise it will not be cost effective. We require a system to function in an integrated way. Unless we have a functional administration, it will very difficult.
Interviewer
Is this not the corporatization of the administrative part of the institution that may include HR function, finance function, future strategy, and future business policy?
Venkateswaran
Yes. But because the lecturers are participating in administration they will know the total function. We need a little bit of professional administration and management. A Professor, who becomes in charge of administration, cannot become an administrator automatically. He has to be a Professor too. An administrator cannot be somebody who is not a Professor. He has to be a Professor and he has to have an administrative bent of mind.
The University administration is also somewhat different from the professional (corporate) administration because every one of them is an educated person, and each one has an independent mind and has a faith in his academic freedom and he cannot easily be made to obey. You have to argue and he should be convinced that it is right. In professional (corporate) administration it is not like that, the last word is from the boss. So, it has to be a system by which you have to convince people. As a matter of fact we have to spend long hours in this process.
Interviewer
Is this a structured process?
Venkateswaran
Yes, it is a structured process. We convene Deans meeting and whenever something has to be changed and call a number of faculty members. What we do is that we do not make it as a statutory process. We all participate and we discuss an idea, we do not discuss who is right or who is wrong and people can have any opinion on those ideas. We always try to give importance to those ideas and we can oppose anybody, which is perfectly alright. We would be good friends beyond it. That he has to convince me or I have to get convinced and this works very well.
Interviewer
How can we model Indian organizations to become globally competitive?
Venkateswaran
Things are changing. But if you want to do a lot of change simultaneously, then you have to get a lot of professionalism into it. You have to have a structure. When you have to have a structure, loyalty doesnt become an important aspect of it, but not being loyal has to be removed.
Interviewer
Which leader do you think you admire in any walk of life?
Venkateswaran
First is teaching. I became a teacher because I had three very good teachers who inspired me, one being my father as a schoolteacher. Then I had one very good teacher in Madurai College and then another person was M. Venkatraman, who was a Professor of Mathematics.
As far as University administration is concerned, of course a few things I took from my previous Director, Dr C.R. Mitra. Of course as it happens, not any existing leader but definitely I was quite influenced by reading Gandhis life, and I thought if you are simple and straightforward then you might not have much problems. It did work. Loyalty and faith is what are required.
Interviewer
What would you call your philosophy of management?
Venkateswaran
My philosophy of management is something in which you should be able to make everybody participate in the development. When I put everybody, I do not mean 100 percent but I mean majority of them. Also, all of them should have a stake in the development of the system. If any one person finds that there is no stake in it (for him or her) then he (or she) will not fit in that. So, we have to create a system by which for all the components there must be some stake in it and one must feel that one can develop. That is the system that we have to follow.
Acknowledgements
The authors special thanks go to Mr Pankaj Saran and Professor S.P. Verma.
Guru Prakash Prabhakar
References
Satsangi, P.S. (2010), “A summary of the Satsang tour, The Dayalbagh Herald, Week 38, Agra, India, pp. 1-5
Bristol Business School, The University of the West of England, Bristol, UKguru.prabhakar@uwe.ac.uk