New Delhi, June 5: The human resource development ministry today asked the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management to try and admit more backward class students from the coming academic year.
But the IITs and the IIMs have rejected the proposal, setting the stage for a fresh spat between India’s Delhi-based education czars and the premier engineering and management institutions.
The IITs this year are each admitting 9 per cent of their students from the OBC category. The IIMs are admitting between 3 per cent (IIM Calcutta) and 8 per cent (IIM Lucknow) OBC students this year.
Under the OBC reservation law, cleared by the Supreme Court on April 10, all central government higher education institutions have to implement 27 per cent OBC quota within three years — that is, by the 2010 academic session.
At meetings with direc- tors of the IITs and the IIMs today, the HRD ministry asked the institutes to try and “accelerate” the implementation of OBC reservations, government officials and institute directors revealed.
The meetings in Delhi had officially been called to discuss the level of preparation for the expansion in student intake this year because of the OBC quotas.
But with elections in several states later this year, and general elections due next year, HRD minister Arjun Singh is learnt to have told his officials to try and convince the institutes to raise OBC quotas from this year. Arjun didn’t attend the meetings.
“The IITs said they were already hard-pressed because of the government decision to start six new institutes this year,” an official said.
Each of the six new IITs is being “mentored” by an existing IIT. The new IITs in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Gujarat and Punjab are being mentored by the IITs in Kanpur, Chennai, Guwahati, Kharagpur, Mumbai and Delhi, respectively. In the absence of any infrastructure for the new IITs, some of the mentor institutes might also have to host students from the new IITs.
Implementing even 9 per cent, as they have promised, will be hard, the IITs told the ministry, sources said.
Sources in the IIMs confirmed that the B-schools were even more forthright in rejecting the ministry’s suggestion.
“Accelerating the pace of implementing OBC quotas is impossible for us. The SC verdict came just two months before the start of the academic session. We are sticking to the existing roll-out plan,” an IIM director said after today’s meeting.
Tiffs between the HRD ministry and the IIMs are not uncommon — the last dispute erupted earlier this year over when to implement their highest-ever fee hike, despite opposition from Arjun.
Such differences between the ministry and the IITs have, however, been less frequent.
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