Does technical education in India contribute to its Core-HRST? A case study of IIT Madras

India is working towards becoming a 'knowledge superpower', expanding its technical education system. But despite a rapidly growing annual turnout of S&T graduates, there is still a disparagingly low ratio of R&D personnel in India's workforce, worrisome for its future S&T capabilities. A disquieting trend has been that graduates from even the best S&T institutions have increasingly chosen future professional or academic avenues that have little to do with their training, due to which, over time, India has lost its best science manpower. On examining a distinguished institution - IIT Madras - the paper unfolds the variety of interconnected incentives and disincentives at ground level that contribute to this situation. This paper is but a step towards indicating the vast amount of further investigation required in assessing whether India's technical education system has sufficiently delivered in its role as the actor primarily in charge of competence building in India's innovation system.