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Piracy has no equivalent word in most of the Indian languages; maybe that is why we really don’t understand it. Whenever we face a problem regarding it, we legalize the violation. And that is exactly what government is doing in the case of premier educational institutions.
In place of developing other good institutions egalitarianism-believing-government is going to free ride on the brand name of IIT’s, IIM’s, and NLS’s. Of course, the students, and with them the vote bank of parents, are going to love it. The competition will dwindle with the increase in seats; and more wards will get tagged IIM or IIT alumni/e. It is like putting a logo of Mercedes or BMW on the Maruti 800 (such happenings are not a rarity in India).
But that happiness of the hoi-polloi is going to follow the diminishing marginal utility principle of Economics. The more people will have the coveted tag, the more un-coveted it will become. The more un-coveted it will become the more redundant the brand name will turn into.
The brand-name, who’s importance any successful company can tell, can give an impetus but can’t be a panacea. Any institution only gets renowned with time, after proving itself in various important parameters. The dwindling of competition, for which the presently happy students are cheering, will be turn out to be their anathema with passing of time.
The politician’s who are the brain behind such policy can appreciate this logic better: Everybody wishes to be PM but can’t be. But the solution of this is not to do away with the post of PM. Similarly not all institutions can get the rank one; or everybody can’t have the best facilities or best students ; or superlative term ‘Best’ can’t be used by everybody
But any creative and competitive spirit needs to know what best is; so that it can aspire for that.
Some IIM’s or IIT’s will again try to get rise above others by re-inventing their brand names. One such example: IIM ABC, which is the keyword among MBA-aspirants. What it stands for is Ahmedabad, Banglore, and Calcutta (impervious to the chagrin of name-changing ministers). But what can guarantee that tomorrow they won’t open another IIM in Ahmedabad, trying again to free ride?
The government in place of developing different brand names is planning to do away with the brand name itself. Somebody should tell the politicians why not Naomi Klein’s seminal book “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” may have asked for doing away with logo, but still “No Logo” is itself a logo.
Bill Watterson, the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, once jokingly said: “I find my life is a lot easier the lower I keep everyone’s expectations”. The politicians missed the joke.
RSS 
Excellent piece of writing. I agree with you that this is a pure suicidal attempt to dilute the academic excellence centres of India.
I too had put down my ramblings about the issue sometime back:
http://madkat70.instablogs.com/entry/manufacturing-iit-ians/
Further the way our politicians is eroding it, being optimist could be worse then being pessimist.
Indeed, the best possible thing our politicians can invent is replication, endlessly of it. And the ’made in India’ logo...
And yes, our politicians can only think about replication and nothing else. May be they need to get acquainted with Joseph Schumpeter’s term: ”Creative Destruction”. Only then they can understand the importance of developing something new.
and secondly by having undeserving candidates in elite institutions they may be destroying their brand name further ...
So in all it doesn’t make sense to me, until, of course their main aim is not to make sense.. :)
A very well written post. I really liked the way you handled the use, misuse and abuse of brand names by our politicians. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece.
thanks for the appreciation, it is really a great feeling that somebody likes your write up.
Also, its not bad to capitalise on the brand name. Yes, overexploitation is.
Though the steps should be steady with all the improvements incorporated in the new facilities, rather than just going to multiply numbers of the same.
But I still feel that to cater to a larger population we need not increase the number of colleges with the same name.
On the other hand we need to allow development of different kind of colleges, where the student can go deciding from the choice of his course.
Just putting IIM tag won’t make every place to be good, but allowing different names to develop could ensure that college can provide better specialization.
I quite second your point in this write up!
Anyway thanks for appreciation. that is the only consolation a citizen of this country can have.
your post makes a hell lot of a sense to me!