On academic leadership

I have made an observation in the last 4.5 years of working in Indian academia. Visionary leadership in academia is a scarce commodity. However, I have found some good examples of academic leadership in my limited experience and will talk about that. 

One such experience was the IIT Mandi HCI Foundation/iHub call for proposals. I was shortlisted but when I got to IIT Mandi, the iHub leadership (their CEO, the institute director, etc.) said, "You all were shortlisted because you were the strongest on paper. We are not particularly interested in the specific ideas you wrote in your proposals but our aim was to get the best people together and connect you all so that you can come up with ambitious ideas that you wouldn't have been able to in isolation." And thus was born a consortium project with a startup and 3 other institutions (IIT Rourkee, IIIT Gwalior, and BITS Pilani Hyderabad) with a grand vision that was very different from each of our individual proposals. The DST has a clear mandate to the iHubs to produce impactful, market-ready solutions for various real-world problems. The IIT Mandi iHub is successful in doing this because of their visionary approach to calling for and evaluating proposals in what I thought was a mostly fair and transparent process. 

A fair and transparent selection, evaluation, and disbursement process along with holding the grantees accountable is critical to creating impact. If a previous grantee failed to deliver what they promised, they should not be getting further funds from the same mechanism. If you are a senior faculty/researcher and have a successful career already, enabling talented younger colleagues is a good way to create even more impact as a leader. I have seen some good examples of this at various levels: centers/departments, institutions, grant agencies, etc. However, we can and should do more at all these levels. 

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