More the merrier ...

One of the many populists measures of Union Budget 2008 - was the setup another 8 new IITs in states like Bihar, Orrisa, Andhra Pradesh etc...
In another related measure, aiming to provide the IIT education to a wider section of the society; the government also plans to implement the OBC Quota starting this very year.
While the issue of reservations is something I am pretty skeptical about;
unlike many of my friends, I really don't mind setting up more IITs on the pattern of the existing ones.

A simple fact check:
In 1961, when the country had 5 IITs (Kharagpur, Bombay, Chennai, Delhi and Kanpur) its population was 0.44 billion. In 2011, the country's projected population is 1.19 billion. Assuming the same percentage of IITians are as intelligent today as back then, we have a problem.
To guarantee linear increase we need atleast 14 IITs by 2011. Add to that the fact that more people want to graduate as IIT engineers - we need even more IITs.

Its pretty clear that the governments helps IITs much more than any other engineering college. IITs are provided with much better infrastructure implying that every thing else remaining constant - IITs are a better place to learn for an average student than say Dyanba Moje College of Engineering Pune and realistically, a Somaiyya etc.

Now we have to answer a few important questions for ourselves...
1. Are the issues that dog the current IIT system (dedication of students / finding good faculty / students toeing the technical line / serving the country etc.) really just pangs of scaling stuff up?
2. Are insufficiency of seats good enough grounds for denying an AIR ~1000 a degree in CSE B.Tech in any IIT?
3. What is the IIT brand anyway?

I think the answer to first 2 questions a pretty clear NO!!

IIT brand : With 7 IITs at the moment, I hardly think any one rates IITB close to IITG, be it prospective employers or faculty in foreign universities. And just like every market driven phenomenon that corrects itself, if CSE IITG closes higher than Aero IITB on the average -- it means that the prospects after graduating from CSE, IITG are better than those of Aero IITB. Period.

If the overall brand of IITs as we perceive it today goes down, as is pretty possible, it would be time for the older / better IITs to dissociate itself from the others. There is only as much IIT Bombay can / should hope to gain from the IIT brand. Since, it is at the top of the heap now, it makes sense for IITB to make a planned forge of the IITBombay brand. Good foreign companies make a intelligent queue for graduates of only certain IITs (or more specifically - certain departments of certain IITs), even now. They are less driven by the IIT brand created largely by the batches of the 70's (who are big names in '08) and more by their IIT employees in the last decade.
Honestly, in the University of California brand there are 10 distinct identities and while Berkeley is by far the most famous, I genuinely doubt anyone speaks of UC Merced (if you have heard of it) in the same breath as UCB. [UCB was founded way back in 1868, while Merced was founded in 2005 and the others sometime in between.] Something similar can soon happen to IITs as well.

So almost the only thing we lose are the claims of statistically exclusivity / lowest acceptance rates, that newspapers / Asok / CBS love to trump about a lot.
While I agree that there might have been political motivation to pass such resolutions, its still a decently positive move.