New IITs maintaining standards of education: Pallam Raju

Jodhpur: The delay in construction of the campuses of the eight new IITs has not affected the "standards of education" and pace of research, Union Minister of Human Resource Development MM Pallam Raju said here on Wednesday.

Referring to IIT-Jodhpur, he said that the institution has done remarkable job in the field of solar energy and promoting entrepreneurship. Attributing the delay to the issues like land acquisition, he said in spite of this delay, the IITs have been faring well as expected from their respective temporary campuses, adding, now a few of them have started construction of their permanent campuses.

Raju was here to lay the foundation stone of the first phase of the construction of the IIT-Jodhpur's campus, one of the 8 new IITs which have been announced under the 11th Five year plan.

Referring to the issue of crunch of the faculty at these IITs, Raju said that picking and appointing right faculty is both challenging and slow process. "To get right permanent faculty for the institutions like IITs with the objective behind their establishment in mind, is a difficult thing.

"But we have not allowed this shortcoming to affect the standards of education and pace of research at these IITs as all of them are moving as desired in their direction meeting their objectives", Raju said.

He said that temporary appointments and guest lecturers are being used by the institutes to make up for the lack of teachers. Besides this the faculty exchange agreements and MoUs with overseas institutions and universities has also helped mitigate this problem to a reasonable extent.

Of the eight IITs only IIT Hyderabad has been able to fill its faculty positions to a great extent and rest of the institutions are afflicted with the crunch of permanent faculty by about 50 per cent. Some experts attribute the crunch in faculty to the locations of these new IITs.

A professor on the condition of anonymity said that the location of Hyderabad IIT has come as an advantage for itself as the city is a metropolis.

"Except this, other IITs are located in areas which are not as much developed as the cities like Hyderabad", he said. A person of the stature of a teacher in a premier institution of the country cannot afford or prefer to live in a city with poor infrastructure or facilities, he added.