Revised Kakodkar panel report to be placed before IIT Joint Council

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) on Thursday decided to place the “re-worked” version of the Kakodkar Committee report on autonomy for Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) before the IIT Joint Council for a final decision.

The revised report is not too different from the original report that had sought seeking a four-fold increase in fees for undergraduate courses at the prestigious IITs but was rejected by the Council saying that it would make IITs inaccessible for a large section of students. However, this time the Committee has suggested a graded subsidy system.

The Committee that presented its original report in February but was asked to rework on it, made a presentation before the Union HRD Minister Kapil Sibal here on Thursday has stuck to its proposal to increase fee from Rs. 50,000 to Rs. 200,000 a year, while suggesting a graded subsidy system that would mean that IITs would provide freeships and scholarships to 25 per cent of the students while levels of partial support would be provided to another set of students and then there would be those who would have access to education loans. Mr. Sibal is said to have suggested that the proposals should be put on the website for a feedback before a final call is taken by the IIT Joint Council.

The five-member Committee, set up to suggest a road map for IIT’s autonomy and growth, had recommended the hike to make IITs more self-sufficient, reduce dependence on grants, and enable the institutes to create faculty and non-faculty posts on their own without having to seek government clearance. The Committee, which presented the report before the Council, also suggested that the 15 IITs should raise the money to run undergraduate courses entirely through tuition fees and not depend on grants.

The Committee was set up in October 2009. Its other members are: T.V. Mohandas Pai, former Director (Human Resource), Infosys; K. Mohandas, Vice-Chancellor of Kerala University of Health and Allied Sciences; Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, IIT Madras; and Hari Bhartia, Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). IIT-Guwahati Director Gautam Barua, IIT-Mandi Director T. Gonsalves and IIT-Kanpur Chairman M. Anandakrishnan were special invitees.

The Committee had a series of meetings with the IIT directors, faculty and industry representatives. Its members visited five universities in China last November to familiarise themselves with the best practices in science education and research.

Source: The Hindu, May 13, 2011

Fee hike in IITs? Sibal non-committal

Asked to rework its earlier report on road map for autonomy and future of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Anil Kakodkar panel has stood by its earlier recommendation that could result in a substantial fee hike at the undergraduate level. The committee made a presentation of its reworked report on Thursday. Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal remained non-committal, and said the final decision would be taken by the IIT Council later. The report would be put in the public domain on Friday.

Laying out the roadmap for research, the panel has said that Ph.D. students should be scaled up from the current 1,000 Ph.D. students per year to 10,000 by 2020-25. It has also said that bright undergraduate students should be enrolled for Ph.D. at the end of their third year. Even faculty strength should be ramped up to 16,000 in the next 10 years. The present strength is 4,000.

The Kakodkar committee has said that 50 central government-funded institutions — other than IITs — be nurtured with the help of IIT faculty. These institutions could be National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) and other institutions.

The reworked report reiterates that IITs should “recover the full operational cost of education” through fee and not take any aid from government’s non-plan budget. Since this would result in a manifold rise in fee, the committee has suggested a “hassle-free” bank loan arrangement at the time of admission.

But for students belonging to reserved category and economically weaker sections, the panel has said the ministry should pay the “full operating cost of education”. It added that the ministry should also take care of the entire cost of education at Ph.D., M.S. and M.Tech. level.

The committee has proposed that government should make an annual outlay of Rs. 150,000 per student in established IITs. For the new ones, an endowment grant of Rs. 50 crore (Rs. 500 million) per IIT should be given over the next five years. To expand infrastructure, the panel has said government should give capital fund at the rate of Rs. 2 million per additional student.

Source: The Times of India, May 13, 2011