Construction of new IIT campuses fails to take-off

The cost of building eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) would be much higher than anticipated by the government with the work for developing permanent campuses not taking-off.

Updated on: Oct 18, 2011, 22:44:48 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The cost of building eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) would be much higher than anticipated by the government with the work for developing permanent campuses not taking-off.

The HRD ministry has decided to prepare new detailed project reports of each of the eight IITs after finding that it will not be possible to build the premier technology institutes at the cost approved by the Union Cabinet.

The government had estimated that the new campus of each IIT will cost Rs 800 crore in 2008, when the Cabinet approved the project. It was also estimated that most of the campuses will be build by 2012.

A review by the HRD ministry has shown that the work on building the new campuses has not started because of delay in acquisition of land and awarding of work by individual IITs. Even boundary walls of new IITs in Rajasthan and Himachal have not been built and some others like IIT Hyderabad has started preliminary work.

The new IITs are running from temporary campuses allocated by state governments till the new campuses were built.

“The IITs had been extremely slow in starting the work and meeting the 2012 deadline was impossible,” a senior government official said. India’s economy rival China between 2008 and 2011 had built at least 10 technology institutes in the last few years to produce high quality manpower.

Despite a policy push by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2008 the slow pace of work has hampered construction of the new IIT campuses. The new IITs at the recent IIT council meeting pointed out that building the new campuses at the envisaged cost of Rs 800 would not possible because the cost of raw material has increased by 30 to 50 %.

The IITs asked the ministry to increase the cost to which the ministry has agreed. The ministry will now prepare a new detailed project report for each of the new IIT and seek the Cabinet’s approval to meet the additional costs.

The new IITs are already facing a faculty crunch with none of them been able to get the faculty strength required to run the institutes. IIT Hyderabad is still better off with faculty strength of 70-80 % while others are working on half of the faculty required.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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