New Delhi, July 29: The Centre is set to approve a proposal soon to start 14 world-class central universities across the country, including one in Calcutta, in an ambitious bid to catch up with the West’s higher education standards.

The proposal for the universities, enunciated in the Eleventh Five Year Plan, will be placed before the cabinet on Thursday and is expected to be cleared soon, top government officials said.

Cabinet recognition is required to formally begin work on the proposal.

The universities will, like other central universities, be funded by New Delhi, but will have the additional mandate of competing in standards with globally renowned varsities like Harvard, Oxford or Cambridge, sources said.

“We expect the cabinet to clear the proposal soon, ideally in one sitting itself. We do not anticipate any opposition,” a senior official at the human resource development ministry said.

Pune, Calcutta, Coimbatore, Mysore, Visakhapatnam, Gandhinagar, Jaipur, Patna, Bhopal, Kochi, Amritsar, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati and Greater Noida have been selected as places where the universities will come up.

“Each of the state governments concerned have identified 700 acres of land. But they cannot begin land acquisition till the cabinet clears the plan,” a source said.

The HRD ministry expects each university to cost over Rs 720 crore, putting the total price tag for the venture at a minimum of Rs 10,080 crore.

Once the cabinet clears the proposal, the HRD ministry plans to hurry through the construction of infrastructure in a bid to try and start academic sessions for “most” of the institutes by 2009, sources said.

“We have been given a clear political indication to get things ready for the launch of the universities by the next academic session,” a source said.

Each campus will have four schools — of engineering, medicine, humanities and sciences — sources said.

Each of the four schools will be built along the lines of India’s best institutions in their field. Unlike existing central varsities, the new centres will focus more on cutting-edge research across streams than on teaching, sources said.

The Centre also plans to start 16 central universities.