Why should government spend money on IITs?

Recently I read an article by Jeswanth Padooru ( http://scroll.in/article/715918/dear-smriti-irani-stop-giving-my-money-to-iitians ) which talks about tax payers money being wasted on education of engineers in IITs where these engineers don't contribute to India after being educated on tax payers money. Author wants government to stop spending money on IITs and ask students to take educational loans and pay the fee. The argument has started with IITs and once author force government to discontinue grants to IITs he will question grants given to smaller collages also because these people can also take loan and income tax for author can be reduced. Once government stops giving grants to collages author will ask government to stop grants to government schools and ask them to get higher fee from students because they will be earning money because of the education they are getting in school.

I have studied right from class first to my B.E. on government subsidy. I did my B.E. in Electronics and Communications from Netaji Shubas Institute of Technology, Delhi. I joined college in 1995 and fee was highly subsidized and whole admission fee was about 6000 rupee and my father could not afford that and he had to borrow money from someone to pay my admission fee. The semester fee was 1600 rupee for semester starting in June and 600 for semester starting in January. I passed out in 1999 and I have been working in India since then. It is 15 years now and I have paid more than 30 Lakhs as income tax to government. So government gets paid back for the subsidized education to students in India.

I did not make it to IIT in my first attempt and decided not to go for second attempt because IIT was charging 20,000 per year as fee and my father could not afford that. Even if I would have qualified for IIT in my first attempt I would have to drop out because my father could not afford it.

Now I come to point of Educational Loans. Author of the article says that it takes 3.4 Lakh per year to educate a student and students are paying only 90,000 out of that and 2.5 Lakhs are borne by the government. Students should be asked to take an educational loan and pay whole 3.4 Lakh per year and repay the loan after getting a job. This amount does not include hostel expanses which will also come to 60,000 per year. So for a 4 year B. Tech. course student will have to take loan of 16 Lakh for his education. Educational loans are not approved as easily said. There is a lot of corruption and Red Tapism which people need to face while taking educational loan. You see one advertisement in newspaper from a bank that they are giving a loan up to 20 Lakh without collateral and assume that any student can walk into any branch of the bank with his exam result and walk out of the bank with a 20 Lakhs loan approved. The real situation is not that good. The amount of 90,000 rupee per year as fee is not a small amount that a poor student can pay without taking a loan. We assume that getting an education loan is as easy as opening a bank account. So I think 95% of people studying in IIT should be having a educational loan. But getting an educational loan is a tough task and that is why only 1% of people studying in IITs are having educational loan. Poor people have already stopped preparing of IIT because they can't afford the fee and getting an educational loan is next to impossible.

I would like to talk about my personal experience with educational loan and scholarships being offered to needy students. When I joined my collage there was a big advertisement in a leading English newspaper where a trust was offering scholarship and loan to needy students and I applied for it. They were offering assistance for paying collage fee and buying books. I requested for 1600 rupee for collage fee and 2000 rupee for buying books. Can you imagine how much money did they give me? I don't think that you will be able to guess it so I give you the answer. They sent a cheque of 90 rupee to my collage. I spent more than 90 rupee for paper work which I had to do for getting this big help.

The current fee of 90,000 rupee per year is already high and has already driven poor students out of the IITs. So I don't mind if fee is increased futher to 3.4 Lakh rupee because rich people can pay that much also. I would be happy to see the day when some study will show that more than 80% of students studying in IITs are having educational loan and saying that getting educational loan was easy.