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Despite Faculty Shortages, India Calls
for 6 New Technology Institutes
By
Shailaja Neelakanta
Issue
cover-dated May 31, 2008
New Delhi — In what has come as a shock
to the board of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology, the
Indian government has directed it to open six new institutes
this year instead of the scheduled three, even as the seven
existing institutes face faculty shortages of 20 perecent to
30 percent. The government directive was sent to the board on
Wednesday but was made public only on Friday.
The six new institutes — in the states
of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Orissa, Punjab, and Rajasthan
— have no premises or faculties of their own, and most of them
are expected to function temporarily out of the seven existing
institutions, one local newspaper reported. The exact locations
of five of the new institutes have also not been decided. The
13 institutes will have a total of 6,872 seats, 700 of which
have been added at the new institutes, said The Times of India.
Admission to the undergraduate engineering
program at the elite Indian Institutes of Technology is highly
coveted. The institutes are considered among the best engineering
schools in the world, and many of their alumni are in top positions
in multinational corporations. A record 320,000 applicants took
the entrance exam in April.
Coincidentally, on Friday the institutes’
admissions board announced the names of students admitted to
the academic session that begins in July.
Some newspapers speculated that the decision to start more institutes
than planned had been made with an eye toward national elections,
scheduled for next year. India’s minister of higher education
didn’t want to give state governments an opportunity to accuse
the central government of stifling the states’ educational ambitions,
one newspaper said.
Other news-media reports said the decision
had been made to accommodate the increase in quota seats this
year. India’s Supreme Court in April upheld a 2006 law that
allots 27 percent of all seats at national public higher-education
institutions to poorer members of lower castes and classes.
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