Probably the most concise and accurate summary of the situation I've read. (Particularly as someone in the UK who's doesn't want to leave!)
It's absolutely not the case anymore, but I can definitely say that the quality of the TV production was raised significantly. Well, you know where the money goes to.
Aside from being underfunded (in comparison to global standards) there are systemic issues with IITs which make it underperform in research - first, they were designed as undergraduate institutes. The administrators constantly harangue, and block the ways of the colleagues who want to do research - for example, disallowing travel during the semester etc.
More importantly, the best PG students in India do not go to the IITs. They go to IISc or abroad. It is the PG students who do most of the research in a university, not the UG students.
Think of this: no teaching university in the US is a top-tier research university.
When faculty systematically underperform in research over 60 years, when many of them were good researchers before they join the IITs, and many of them continue to be good researchers after they leave the IIT system, we need to rethink.
Faculty must be allowed to do research 90 % of the time, travel freely, and spend very little time on teaching/administration. You can't have your legs in both the boats.
God no. This is exactly the problem that most undergraduate campuses in the US are grappling with right now. Pedagogy (you know, the purported reason for the existence of universities when they were first established) is taking a backseat to research, with students not deriving nearly the value from college that they should be. Most newly-minted PhD candidates want to create rigorous research programs, even at small liberal arts colleges, much to the detriment of those who matriculate (and who consequently accumulate ludicrous amounts of debt).
It would be much better for academia to have an honest conversation with itself and note that some people want to teach while others want to do research, and send the research-inclined to non-teaching institutes like IAS, LLNL, the Broad Institute, etc and the teaching-inclined to work with undergraduates. The outliers who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram can choose for themselves which direction they want to go.
It also would help if workshops to develop pedagogical techniques weren't almost universally optional for grad students and the ones who do engage in them get looks for wanting to do them instead of doing research... this may be just an impression on my part, but I really felt like grad students I've encountered who prioritize teaching over publications get marginalized.
IITs are all about placements and big salary pay days. It works that way because the alumni want to preserve the value of that name on their resume, only way they can do that is continue to pay obscene salaries to their own kind. So that when they go out looking for jobs, the same thing can work in their case too.
Once you arrive here, all questions on research or doing good work et all go out of the window. You are just about marketing gas, advertising you own legend.
A few start up founders even told me they avoid hiring IITian for this very reason. They act like they are above everything, nothing you pay is enough, they always think some work is beneath them. And yeah barely stay before a project completes.
Lastly, the only thing IITians train their whole academic career is for being good at interviews and exams. That's understandable, because they only thing they ever do all life is hop jobs.
Stanford, Carnegie Mellion, Harvard, MIT, Caltech are all "teaching universities". Most professors do research along side their teaching. Courses in India are outdated everywhere. If research is encouraged the quality of education will definitely go up.
On the whole, the actions of both the voting public in many countries, let alone the politicians that they vote for, do seem to be displaying an increasingly aggressive level of stupidity. Or possibly, if not stupidity, one could more accurately call it apathy.
That said, money-making opportunities are present, as they always were.