To beat the best, you need new thinking
Frugality index is one concept
Breaking govt monopoly is key.
The 2026 University rankings are out. No Indian university is in the top 200. For those with appetite for embarrassment and humiliation, here are the details:
Let me attempt a like-for-like comparison
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Annual Expenditure Comparison (Approx.)
IITs (all 23 combined)
• USD ~$1.4–1.7 billion
• Covers everything
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Tsinghua University (China)
• USD ~$6–7 billion per year
• Roughly 4× the spend of all IITs combined
• Heavy state backing + military, semiconductor, AI, and national lab funding.
• Single university, concentrated excellence.
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MIT (USA)
• USD ~$5 billion per year
• ~3× IIT system spend
• Endowment-driven, with massive industry-sponsored research and defence funding.
• Faculty-to-student and lab density far higher than IITs.
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Stanford University (USA)
• USD ~$8–9 billion per year
• ~5–6× IIT system spend
• Driven by endowment income, healthcare system, venture ecosystem, and sponsored research.
• One university outspends India’s entire elite engineering system.
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What this comparison really tells us
• IITs are not underperforming — they are undercapitalized.
• India expects IITs to compete with institutions that have multi-billion-dollar annual firepower, while funding them at a fraction of global benchmarks.
• Despite this, IITs consistently punch above their weight in talent output, entrepreneurship, and global influence.
If ancient Nalanda could attract scholars from across Asia without modern capital,
then modern India’s challenge is not talent or culture — it is institutional scale and funding models.
To truly “beat the world’s best through innovative business models”, India must:
• 2–3× IIT funding or
• Radically innovate university finance, endowments, and industry integration
So it’s down to finding USD 4-5 billion pa additional for IIT Alone. Simplistically put, 5000 alumni have to promise usd 1m each annually. No problem at all.
The next question is why will they put it in ?? This is the question no one is asking. These are stinking rich individuals who were born in scarcity, tempered in cut throat competition and tutored to win in adversity. These are not people who lack investment ideas or fame procurement options.
They need purpose.
A central narrative to rally for.
No iit could provide that.
The IIT Alumni Council did just that.
Having done so, it is out to compete in all aspects of social competition. Our President sponsors the Institute of Goodness. A patron donor sponsors the Hall of Happiness.
The central pillar of the IITac narrative is that doing good cannot be the monopoly of the govt. Because any uncontested monopoly is bound to be inefficient and non optimal.
But then how do you compete without cooperating ? And therein lies the key to the new model of Universities.
More in the next post.