New Delhi, March 1 (PTI): As many as 135,000 IIT alumni will take on corruption and alleged “saffronisation” of the premier technology institutes by forming a confederation, particularly in the wake of the Satyendra Dubey murder.

Office-bearers of the alumni associations of seven Indian institutes of technology would meet on March 6 to finalise the proposal.

“We will meet on March 6 and hopefully by March 15, the proposal is likely to crystallise,” Y.P.S. Suri, the secretary-general of IIT Kharagpur’s Delhi chapter said.

The IITs in Delhi, Kanpur and Kharagpur have already responded to the proposal; Mumbai, Chennai and other IITs are expected to follow suit, Suri said.

The main objective of the move is to create a “brand name” to “stand up” and confront the system in a bid to weed out corruption “and carry forward the unfinished task of whistle-blowers like Satyendra Dubey”, he said.

Dubey, an IIT Kanpur alumnus, had complained to the Prime Minister’s Office about corruption in the Golden Quadrilateral highway project. A manager with the National Highways Authority of India, he was killed last November.

Suri was critical of human resource development minister Murli Manohar Joshi for “denigrating” the premier technology institution by allegedly appointing his nominees to senior positions, “though there were no violations of the procedure for such appointments”.

“Joshi as HRD minister has every right to ask the faculty to pull up its socks, but he should also look into grievances,” Suri said.

IIT faculties, he added, were no longer attracting the best as the institutes were poor paymasters compared to their B-school counterparts, the Indian institutes of management.