New Delhi, Nov. 21: The Indian Institutes of Technology have formally opposed a change in their status and form to universities as suggested by a central panel reviewing higher education in India.

Senior officials representing the IITs today told the panel headed by former University Grants Commission chairman Yash Pal that the proposed change in identity was unnecessary, sources attending the meeting said.

Yash Pal’s proposal to convert IITs from mere “undergraduate factories” to full-fledged universities was first reported by The Telegraph on September 13, 2008.

The senior physicist had told this newspaper that he was concerned over the inability of the IITs to produce students who continued in academics and pursued research.

A university-style education may help the institutes encourage postgraduate and research-related studies, he had said.

Today, at a meeting with the panel in Mumbai, officials from the IITs, however, said the proposal was unnecessary and “retrogressive”.

The IIT system, they argued, was superior to that employed in central universities, the sources said.

Like universities, the IITs already offer a menu of varied courses. Apart from management, which all the IITs offer, postgraduate humanities courses are common to all the institutes.

These include courses in language, philosophy, political science, economics and even film criticism. IIT Madras has even started undergraduate humanities courses.

“Adopting the university model of education, with separate departments for postgraduate studies and research, is not necessary to offer a variety of courses,” an IIT director said. The IITs have privately been opposing the proposal since it was reported in this newspaper.

Unlike most other universities, the IITs allow undergraduate engineering students the option of taking courses in humanities, management or from any other department alongside their principal course.

An undergraduate mechanical engineering student can, for instance, study film criticism as an optional subject. Students can choose to be marked in these courses.

“From such a liberal education system, to convert IITs into rigid universities would be retrogressive,” an official from an IIT said.

IIT officials concede, however, that the institutes have principally focused on undergraduate students.

The IT boom in the late 1990s that led to a massive expansion in job offers to engineering graduates contributed to the drift away from research — not just in IITs, but across Indian tech schools, government officials said.

In 2006, 2.3 lakh students graduated from engineering colleges across the country. The same year, just over 1,000 students received PhDs in engineering subjects.

The P. Rama Rao committee, set up to review the IITs in its 2004 report, said: “Securing employment after a BTech has almost become a cultural feature. The troubling trend has been that a candidate takes to a PhD only when other professional career prospects have been denied to him.”