New IITs are coming up speedily

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Late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi called the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) brain banks. India’s exclusive engineering club is now being expanded. The Union HRD ministry is opening six new IITs instead of just the three that were supposed to begin operations this year in Bihar, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. This includes the fourth one that has been announced in Himachal Pradesh. There will now be 13 IITs with a total of 6,872 seats. More than 700 seats will be added thanks to the six new IITs. Classes for IITs in Punjab, Orissa and Rajasthan will function out of the IITs in Delhi, Kanpur and Kharagpur respectively. IIT Mumbai will mentor the IIT at Gandhinagar in Gujarat. Each IIT is expected to have 120 seats and three courses will be offered in the first year. The first set of admissions for the new IITs will take place in June 2008. In the new IITs, 27% reservations will be implemented on day one of the academic session.

Meanwhile, IIT Kharagpur, which is going to mentor the new institute of technology coming up in Bhubaneswar, Orissa, 321 km and 5 hours away, for three years, has offered to recruit students and start classes too till a proper infrastructure is in place. Asked whether 120 students seeking admission in IIT Orissa will be accommodated in Kharagpur for the 2008-09 session, Madhusudhan Chakraborty, acting director of IIT Kharagpur, says, “As of now, I really cannot comment.” But IIT Kharagpur will give whatever support is possible, he adds.

As it turns out, it will not be easy for IIT Kharagpur to lend its faculty to the new institute. Like all other institutes of excellence, IIT Kharagpur has been facing a huge crunch in teaching staff. “We have more than 200 positions vacant in IIT Kharagpur itself,” says Chakraborty. “It’s essential to have a very good faculty, passionate about teaching, because we take students of such merit and have a responsibility towards them,” he points out. “We move minds, not matter,” Chakraborty adds, philosophically.

The Orissa government is scouting for 600 acres to set up the institute of technology. IIT Kharagpur too is adding to its infrastructure—building more classrooms and hostels—to take on additional students. It has already taken in 9% of OBC students, as part of the HRD ministry’s directive to implement 27% reservation in IITs and IIMs in three years.