Construction work at snail pace at 8 new IIT campuses

Students of eight new IITs will have to wait longer to shift to new campuses as none of them have made "real" progress despite the June deadline.A Flagging off this issue, a Parliamentary panel on HRD pressed for "expediting" the work to help students avail the best facilities to pursue their studies. Observing that "real construction work is yet to start", the Parliamentary standing committee noted that only two of them -- IIT Bhubaneswar and IIT Mandi -- have seen some progress in the construction work of the main campus. In case of IIT Patna and IIT Hyderabad, the panel said only the boundary wall has been completed. The new IITs at Bhubaneswar, Mandi, Gandhinagar, Indore, Hyderabad, Patna, Ropar and Rajasthan, set up in 2008-09 and 2009-10 and running from temporary facilities, were given a time-line of June 2013 to have their new campuses ready. "The new campuses should be made operational as soon as possible," it said, adding, one must not forget that IITs are premier institutes attracting the best talents from across the country.A In the action taken report, HRD Ministry has said all the IITs have been advised to put in place a mechanism for rigorous monitoring of the project, with video conferencing being organised with the directors. The committee, similarly, was also constraint to observe that all the five Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISERs) set up in the initial years of the 11th Plan Period are yet to get their new campuses. For advanced studies and research sin the frontier areas of science, IISERs have to have state-of-art buildings, fully equipped labs and rich libraries so as to enable students in pursuing various advanced courses of higher learning. "The committee accordingly recommends that IISERs need to be made fully functional in the real sense. Required funds should be provided as and when there is a need. It is high time all of them move to their campuses at the earliest," it said. The five IISERs have been set up at Kolkata, Pune, Mohali, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram.