Singh: Final say

New Delhi, Oct. 26: The Centre is thinking of inducting a former Indian Institute of Technology student into the engineering schools’ highest decision-making body.

The move will enable the alumni to play a formal role in charting out the institutes’ future policies as members of the IIT Council, top government officials said.

Ex-students have donated millions of dollars to the IITs, and many continue to closely follow developments at the premier institutes.

The human resource development (HRD) ministry has accepted in principle a proposal to nominate a member of the Pan IIT Alumni Association to the IIT Council, sources said.

A formal decision is yet to be taken by education minister Arjun Singh, who heads the council, the sources added.

“In effect, we are giving, for the first time, the IIT alumni a formal role in policy-making for the institutes. The IIT alumni have always contributed to their alma mater, and the feeling within the government is that they should be entrusted with more responsibility,” a senior ministry official said.

The ministry is set to restructure the IIT Council, and the ex-student nominee may be inducted during the restructuring, the official said.

The proposal comes at a time the IITs are witnessing their fastest ever expansion. The Centre has announced eight new IITs under the Eleventh Five Year Plan in addition to the seven existing ones. Six of the eight promised IITs have started classes this year.

Inputs from the alumni could be useful in planning the future of the new IITs from a “student’s perspective”, the ministry official said.

The IIT Council, apart from Arjun, is made up by senior HRD ministry officials, other government representatives, the directors of the IITs, and C.N.R. Rao, the chief scientific adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

The proposal was made by the Pan IIT Alumni Association to higher education secretary R.P. Agrawal, the sources said.

“We believe that as IIT alumni, we have a significant stake in the future of the IITs. It is in our interest to see that the IIT system improves,” association chairman Ashank Desai, an alumnus of IIT Bombay, told The Telegraph.

“There can be no better way to contribute to helping the system than by participating in the IIT Council,” he said.

Former students have in the past been members of advisory panels for the various IITs — posts that allowed them, at best, to give advice. Some have also been members of boards of governors at IITs, where they could take part in decision-making for a particular IIT.

The boards of governors, however, have no power over the IIT system as a whole.