Starting trouble for new IITs

Excerpts from India Business Hour on CNBC-TV18 Watch the full show » RELATED NEWS IIT Kanpur & Undercover Utopia present Alfaaz '08 IIT Bombay builds F1 car Nifty BSE | NSE 10/02/12 Are Mutual Funds betting on Nifty?

Sruthi Gottipati , CNBC-TV18

The government had announced that it would start six new IIT s by July this year. But three of them at Rajasthan, Andhra and Bihar are facing starting trouble and three more are still on paper. With a tight deadline of less than two months, there is still nothing on-ground regarding the three new IITs in Gujarat, Orissa and Punjab.

Ashok Misra , Director, IIT Bombay which is mentoring the new IIT in Gujarat said, "With regard to the new IITs, no funds have been allocated so far. We will have to hire new faculty. It's a greenfield project. Nothing really exists on ground there. So, we will have to see how we can attract new faculty to those areas, to that IIT."

Arkss Srinivas , Director, Time Coaching classes said, "None of the three new IITs are ready to start off."

Lack of infrastructure

That's not all, IITs in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar are facing hiccups as well. Despite support from exitsing IITs, there is still no independent infrastructure or lab facilities in these institutes.

Arkss Srinivas, Director, Time Coaching classes said, "The first batch guys are going to be taking a slight risk but in the long process it's a fifty-fifty game. The fact that they are getting into IIT is always going to be overriding the fact that they don't have a campus the first three years." 

Need for counselling

Students with ranks up to 8000 in the IIT JEE are currently waiting to be counselled. They will decide on which IITs and which engineering branch they can get into based on their ranks.

Mansi, student, IIT-JEE ranked 6178 in IIT-JEE said, "I'll go for the older IITs as the brand of the institute matters more to me and the infrastructure and faculty is more established in the seven IITs."

Ayush, student, IIT-JEE, ranked 3910 in IIT-JEE said, "I don't mind opting for the new IITs as the branch is more important to me."

There's a huge demand for students of an IITians calibre in the Indian industry and the new IITs are a step to meet that need. But the biggest challenge for IITs would be to ensure that the quality is not compromised for quantity.