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Older IITs to mentor proposed new ones
New IITs to offer courses on mechanical, civil, electrical and computer science engineering from the 2015 academic year from rented premises, officials say
New Delhi: The government has asked four older Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) to support the five proposed IITs but restricted the new institutes from offering courses other than core engineering subjects to students.
The new IITs will offer courses on mechanical, civil, electrical and computer science engineering from the 2015 academic year from rented premises, said two government officials.
The union budget presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley had proposed to set up five new IITs. India currently has 16.
IIT Madras will mentor two new IITs at Palakkad in Kerala and Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh. IIT Delhi will handhold the proposed one in Jammu, IIT Mumbai will be the parent institute for IIT Goa and IIT Hyderabad will support IIT Raipur.
“The HRD (human resource development) ministry has already asked four IITs including IIT Hyderabad which came into existence in 2008 to start work on new ones so that the proposed ones start operation in the next six months,” said one of the two officials, requesting anonymity. The second government official said that looking at the delay in setting up campuses of IITs that came up since 2007-08, the HRD ministry wants to fix a timeframe—may be four years—for building campuses for the proposed new IITs.
The government auditor in a report in December had said that the ministry’s cost requirement for opening eight IITs has escalated by more than 150% due to delays and because it ignored suggestions made by the expenditure finance committee of the finance ministry and the erstwhile planning commission.
“As a result of the delay, the ministry proposed in May 2014 to revise the cost of estimates from ₹ 6,080 crore to ₹ 15,664 crore, i.e. an increase of more than 150% over the initial project cost,” the Comptroller and Auditor General of India said.
IIT Madras director Bhaskar Ramamurthi confirmed the development and said both the older IITs and HRD ministry had gotten wiser after opening eight new IITs in last six years. So the first thing that has been decided is that IITs will have to commence operation from rented buildings instead of getting housed in an older one in the first year, and the second is fixing some timeline for building new campuses.
“Bringing new students to mentoring IITs will be a mistake. Once you bring them to an existing older IIT and then ask them to go to an rented campus will not do good. States have agreed to provide rented campuses to begin with and ground work has started to finalize the land for permanent campuses,” Ramamurthi said, adding that Andhra Pradesh had already selected land in Tirupati.
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First Published:1 Jan 2015, 11:32 PM IST
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