The State of HASMED Today

At the heart of any technical institute, one might assume, pulses a drive for algorithms, codes, and innovation. Yet, the human mind is not merely made to compute and solve alone. It also interprets, questions and makes sense of the world through the rich tapestry of social and philosophical ideas that shape our lives. 

When the Kishore Chatterjee Committee released its report in 2021, it offered a forward-looking vision that the institute should not only produce engineers of formidable technical ability but also graduates capable of independent thought, ethical leadership, and sensitivity to the human dilemmas of the twenty-first century. 

Under the curriculum reform that followed, this vision was translated into practice. Where earlier students were required to complete a small number of electives from the Humanities and Social Science (HSS) basket, typically two, depending on their department. The new curriculum replaced this with a broader HASMED basket: an umbrella spanning courses from Humanities and Social Sciences, Management, Entrepreneurship and Design. The students must now complete a minimum number of courses from the HASMED basket. It also introduced a set of compulsory pairs of first-year courses on Introduction to HASMED, carrying eight credits in total.

On paper, the reform represents a decisive shift, an institutional commitment to humanising technical education. Yet, as one steps from the aspirational language of committee reports into the lived reality of students, the implementation falls short of its promise. While the ambition and the structure exist, the structure within, what students actually study and how they experience it, tells a more ambivalent story.

A Narrow Canvas 

A review of recent course data reveals that the range of HASMED offerings, particularly within the HSS department, remains largely stagnant since the curriculum reform. In Autumn 2023, the HSS department offered 31 interdisciplinary HASMED courses. Two years later, that number stands at 18—a noticeable contraction rather than an expansion. 

While Management and Entrepreneurship continue to offer a modest roster of electives, there has been little tangible growth in either range or number of courses since the curriculum reform. In contrast, the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) has expanded the number of electives it offers appreciably, providing a broader and more flexible set of electives that allows students genuine choice.

The imbalance, however, is not only numerical. Within HSS itself, a significant share of courses cluster around a few recurring themes—philosophy, Indian thought and cultural traditions, while areas like political science, arts, literature, and applied social sciences remain thinly represented. Topics that directly engage with contemporary concerns, such as ethics in technology and the workplace, sociology of technology, and notions of inequality and justice, are particularly scarce. The result is a curriculum that, despite its noble vision, risks intellectual insularity.

To be sure, there is value in preserving courses rooted in India’s intellectual traditions as they explore traditions that deserve serious academic study and their inclusion prevents IITs from being myopically technocratic. Indeed, learning to wrestle with these disciplines can sharpen cognitive faculties in ways not immediately obvious to students accustomed to algorithms and calculations.

Nevertheless, when such offerings dominate the landscape, the curriculum risks becoming lopsided and tilting towards the esoteric. Students encounter niche philosophical discourses but often have limited understanding of how the society functions and how the technology they create, interacts with, affects everyday life.

The imbalance is partly a product of departmental constraints as courses offered depend on the expertise of available faculty and the historical trajectory of the department. Yet this structural explanation should not justify curricular stagnation. If HASMED is to fulfil its intended purpose of producing “well-rounded” individuals as the new curriculum envisioned, deliberate efforts must be made to broaden the repertoire of courses, recruiting faculty with expertise in diverse fields and designing electives that reflect both global developments and the social contexts students will inhabit upon graduation.

The First-Year Shuffle 

The first-year HASMED courses were envisioned as a common foundation where every student, regardless of branch, gets to engage with ideas beyond their core technical work. Each student is assigned two compulsory courses, designed to offer a mix of application and reflection. The allocation of courses is nominally based on student preferences, though how much weight these preferences actually carry in the allocation remains unclear. 

Students are assigned two introductory courses across Philosophy, Sociology, Literature, Arts, Psychology, Design, Management and Entrepreneurship. While the idea is to ensure variety, the result often ends up uneven. Courses like Introduction to Management or Entrepreneurship attract overwhelming demand, given their career-oriented and practical appeal, while the rest of the courses can feel theory-heavy and abstract to first-year students still adjusting to the academic environment. When both assigned courses fall into the former category, it often leaves students feeling like they didn’t get exposure to the more applied side of HASMED.

The issue isn’t with the disciplines, but rather with how they are introduced. A simple solution could be to divide first-year HASMED courses into two baskets–one featuring Management, Design and Entrepreneurship, the other including the broader humanities and social sciences, such that each student gets one course from each basket. Such a structure would balance reflection with application, giving all students a fairer and fuller taste of what HASMED was meant to offer.

The Practical Pillars Under HASMED 

Beyond the humanities and social sciences, the HASMED umbrella extends into three more applied domains: Management, Entrepreneurship and Design. Each was meant to be a practical dimension to the humanistic foundation, equipping students with organisational, entrepreneurial and creative literacy alongside their technical training. Yet, the extent to which these departments have realised that vision varies considerably.

The management component, for instance, presents a significant bottleneck. Students encounter it first through the introductory first-year course HASMED course. Beyond that, those wishing to explore the subject further can only do so by pursuing a formal minor, an option that, while well-intentioned, remains highly restrictive as entry is gated by a steep CPI cutoff. Even within the minor, the range of available courses is narrow. Moreover, individual management courses, such as those in finance, marketing or human resources, which could meaningfully complement an engineering education, cannot be independently taken without committing to the full 30-credit structure of the minor. Most other electives offered by the department remain unavailable to undergraduates. In this sense, the curriculum reforms have improved the structure and number of offerings on paper, but not the supply, as the number, variety and accessibility of management courses have seen little evolution. This is less of a failure than a gap to waiting to be addressed with clear room to grow.

The approach to entrepreneurship, meanwhile, reflects a steady and appreciable effort to increase exposure. The inclusion of an introductory course in the first year marks a conscious effort to expose students to the startup mindset earlier in their academic life. These courses are built around a project-based core, where students are required to either dissect an existing startup or attempt to build their own by navigating customer discovery, business models, and basic financial planning. 

This is an area where the institute’s vision aligns with the practice, supplemented by practical, learn-by-doing teaching methods. ENT courses are usually received enthusiastically by the students with high class engagement. Classroom work is supplemented by guest lectures from founders and support systems, such as prototype funding and clear pathways to campus incubators like SINE and the IDEAS program. 

Another tangible example of expansion can be seen in the design offerings. In the recent years, the Industrial Design Center (IDC) has commendably broadened the canvas of electives available to undergraduate students in both the number of offerings and variety, transforming it into a vibrant space for creative and experiential learning in an otherwise technical-heavy curriculum. The offerings cover a remarkable spectrum, from the tangible skills of pottery and handloom weaving to the contemporary mediums of animation and virtual reality. 

The Classroom Disconnect

Yet content is not the only challenge undermining the success of these courses. The manner in which they are taught is equally, if not more, troubling. A substantial number of courses still rely on the traditional model of rote learning and recall, with genuine student understanding neither assessed nor required. Instead of demanding independent reasoning, stimulating fresh ideas, and encouraging genuine debate and critical engagement, classes often devolve into one-way lectures with minimal space for dialogue, case studies, or collaborative exercises. For some instructors, teaching appears more of an obligation than a craft, and such indifference further deepens student disengagement. 

These problems are not unique to HASMED, yet the basket can only achieve its true potential when course material is taught in ways that genuinely cultivate these intellectual capacities. While some courses succeed in flourishing genuine debate, compelling students to engage with the reading material, craft analytical essays and coax independent thought into being, they remain the minority, and the inconsistency across courses renders the larger structure precarious. What is needed is a systematic shift towards teaching and assessment practices that prioritise argumentation, dialogue and critical enquiry over mechanical regurgitation of facts. 

But this cannot be dismissed as a complication stemming solely from the faculty side. Students, too, are equally, if not more, responsible stakeholders in the inability of these courses to realise their purpose. Often, HASMED electives are regarded as “easy courses” and “CPI boosters,” chosen out of compulsion to meet credit requirements or marginally improve grades. This mindset is evident right from the registration stage, when seniors and peers are consulted to identify “easy HASMED electives”, and is further reinforced by the culture of last-minute all-nighters. Even in the relatively few courses that incorporate discussion-based or creative assessments, student involvement is underwhelming, with many failing to attend classes as even a basic commitment. The engineering mindset further prevents students from taking these courses seriously, leading them to overlook intellectually stimulating options in favour of simpler alternatives.

This dynamic produces a vicious cycle of mutual demotivation: poor student involvement prompts professors to deliver low-effort teaching, which in turn further discourages students and fosters aversion to these courses. The essence of HASMED is neglected, and an invaluable opportunity for learning is squandered in what should have been a shared responsibility to preserve the sanctity of the courses and make the most of them. What is required, in fact, is a paradigm shift in teaching and assessment practices, one that prioritises argumentation, dialogue, and critical inquiry over mechanical repetition of facts.

Looking Beyond the Institute 

To assess the HASMED system at IIT Bombay more meaningfully, it is important to look at how some of the world’s top technical institutions have integrated the humanities and social sciences into their curricula. Even more insightful would be to examine models that the creators of HASMED themselves would likely have drawn inspiration from. The most telling comparison is with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a university that, like IIT Bombay, is mainly a technical institute yet prioritises humanities-based education at an entirely different level. It does not treat the study of such courses as a mere obligation but rather as an essential and deeply relevant component of education.

MIT’s HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) is built on a simple philosophy: engineers must learn to think critically about people, culture and society and its system aims to ensure that students achieve both intellectual breadth and depth. The system is broadly divided into two parts: distribution and concentration. While students are required to explore each of the three branches by taking up at least one course in each domain of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, they are also mandated to specialise in a particular one as per their individual interests. Finally, students can further pursue two additional elective courses, thus providing flexibility in their curriculum. Altogether, this structure constitutes nearly one-fourth of the total core courses that MIT undergraduates are required to complete as part of their degree.

The logic behind such a structure is straightforward that sustained engagement is likely to produce more than superficial familiarity. By contrast, HASMED offers far more latitude where students can meet their requirements by completing a smaller number of courses, often from very different areas, giving them the freedom to sample widely. Many students value this autonomy, while some worry that the lack of a scaffold makes it harder to establish any lasting understanding of these disciplines at all.

The divergence, then, is less about the vision and more about the implementation. While HASMED was envisioned with broad goals, its current implementation risks drifting into a system where students are more concerned about credit requirements than pursuing a coherent intellectual thread. The comparison with MIT is not to prescribe a model but to carefully consider the choices at hand: whether our institute wishes to continue giving students maximum flexibility and breadth, focus more on depth of understanding of specific domains or find a middle ground that balances the spirit of both.

Why Industry and Society Should Care

Many students who arrive at IIT Bombay after years of preparing for competitive exams haven’t had much space to develop the habits of critical inquiry. They’re exceptional at working hard and capable of absorbing complex material, but the system leaves scant room for skills like analysing a policy, questioning an argument or evaluating the claims of those in power. This is not an inherent flaw of the students themselves, but the education system they have been a part of. HASMED is meant to fill this gap, and when the courses are designed and taught well, the impact is meaningful and tangible. 

Take, for instance, HS449: Capitalism – Theories, Histories and Varieties. Its title may appear distant from engineering, but in the classroom, it discusses why some societies see growth, while others falter, and how political and bureaucratic structures shape economic growth. Students study how China’s state-driven model differs from India’s and begin to understand how different structures have led countries to where they are. For a cohort that will go on to lead companies, work as entrepreneurs, researchers or bureaucrats, this sets the background against which their decisions will play out and affect society. 

A very different kind of intellectual training emerges in HS465: Moral and Political Philosophy, where students read thinkers like Gandhi and Ambedkar, not as historical figures to memorise, but as voices to be examined and questioned under an ethical lens. Classroom discussions prompt students to confront ethical dilemmas, get exposed to different political ideologies, and encounter ideas they wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. For many, this is the first time they are asked not only what they believe in, but also why. These habits shape thoughtful and ethical leadership, urging us to reflect on the social and ethical weight of the designs and technologies they will go on to build. 

Additionally, the contemporary industry requires employees who can perform more than just technical tasks. They are expected to manage teams, read consumer and social behaviour, and make decisions that have ethical consequences. In this sense, the workplace is not a sterile laboratory; it is a microcosm of society, rife with human complexities. An engineer who is technically proficient but lacks the ability to understand people, society, and consequences of technology is incomplete.

Here lies HASMED’s true significance. Far from being ornamental in the curriculum, if implemented properly, it has the potential to prepare students for precisely these societal and organisational challenges. Courses in management, organisational psychology, sustainability, or governance would bridge the gap between technical expertise and real-world application. At present, however, HASMED’s offerings fall short of this potential, leaving graduates to acquire such competencies haphazardly and belatedly in the workplace.

Conclusion

IIT Bombay, to its credit, has made commendable strides to establish itself as more than a technical institute, drawing inspiration from global institutions like Stanford and Berkeley. The very creation of HASMED reflects these efforts. The next stage, however, requires translating the vision into a more coherent reality for HASMED to achieve its stated goal of socially attuned, globally aware engineers. This means expanding the range of faculty and courses, calling for active curricular reimagination and collaborating with diverse institutes. None of this calls for abandoning IIT Bombay’s technical identity. Rather, it calls for a better understanding of what a complete engineering education should look like today. If HASMED grows in this direction, it can grow beyond being a set of compulsory courses and emerge as one of the institute’s most substantive academic strengths.