Cabinet grants NITs autonomy

With Indian technology industry booming like never before, the government has decided to upgrade 20 National Institutes of Technology into full-fledged technical universities.

Published on: Mar 24, 2006, 02:09:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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With Indian technology industry booming like never before, the government has decided to upgrade 20 National Institutes of Technology into full-fledged technical universities.

The Cabinet on Thursday approved the National Institutes of Technology Bill, 2006, which envisages replacing the present administrative framework of 20 National Institutes of Technology with a more autonomous one.

The bill will be introduced in the May session of the Parliament.

Once the bill is enacted, the societies governing the NITs will cease to exist and the institutes will be placed directly under the administrative control of the HRD ministry with boards of governors heading affairs. The chairperson of the board will be appointed by President of India, who will also be Visitor to each institute.

The ministry will also have a say in the appointment of the director and deputy director of each institute. "They will be appointed by the central government, with prior approval of the Visitor, for a term of five years," the Bill states.

A senior ministry official informed, "As regards power and autonomy, these institutes will be like the central universities. The NITs will be able to award their own degrees, start new courses as per the changing demands and initiate research projects. The new law will help them increase the intake of students by 8-10 per cent in the next two to three years, in much the same way as the Indian Institutes of Technology".

Ministry officials say the NIT Bill is the second law for technical education institutions after the Indian Institutes of Technology Act of 1961.

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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