Alumni Guest House : Donated by Mr. Mody (Class of '55)

NEW DELHI: The three new IITs in Bihar, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh will teach not only engineering, but also design and creative arts, management, health sciences, humanities and social sciences.

The HRD ministry wants the three new IITs to start functioning this academic year from the rented premises. However, a final decision on this is yet to be taken.

In the Expenditure Finance Committee meeting, the Planning Commission representative was of the view that to make these IITs world class, sufficient time be given to develop the requisite infrastructure. But IIT, Kanpur, director pointed out that most of the existing IITs had started their classes from rented premises. He said it was the quality of the faculty rather than the classrooms that make world class institutions.

To be set up at an outlay of Rs 760 crore each over six years, outsourcing will be resorted to in the three IITs for various routine services. In fact, the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) has only approved creation of the post of director and the registrar in each institute along with minimum support staff. The HRD ministry would submit a separate proposal to EFC for support staff.

In the EFC meeting, the representative of the department of expenditure suggested that the new IITs should endeavour to outsource major areas of work, perhaps by borrowing the template followed by the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. The official felt that subsequently a national template for all such institutes to be set up in future could be developed.

Initially, each institute will have an intake capacity of 200 students, but when fully developed, each IIT will have a total student strength of about 3,000 students with approximately 2,000 of them in B Tech, 500 in M Tech, 400 in Ph.D and 100 as post-doctoral fellows.

The new IITs will be mentored by one of the existing IITs to enable them to attain high standards. Each institute will have a faculty strength of 262 at the end of the seventh year of operation and adhere to the teacher-student ratio of 1:9, as in the case of other IITs.