New Delhi, April 6: The Indian Institutes of Technology mentoring new IITs starting this year will have to double up as moneylenders to the new ones at a time when they are struggling to make their own ends meet.

A financially stretched central government has asked IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee to tighten their own belts to fund the start of new IITs in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, and Mandi, Himachal Pradesh, respectively, The Telegraph has learnt.

The human resource development ministry has turned down requests from the two mentor IITs for funds to start the new institutes after the government’s finance wing objected to releasing money.

The new IITs have to return the amount to their mentors once the government clears their funds but they won’t pay any interest.

The HRD ministry’s decision, officials said, is a direct fallout of the government’s dwindling finances — a result of the economic downturn and the limited resources an interim budget provides.

The interim budget presented by acting finance minister Pranab Mukherjee in February allocated Rs 200 crore for setting up the new IITs. But only a third of this amount — around Rs 66 crore — is available with the government to spend over the four months before the next Parliament session, by when a new government will be in place.

Of the Rs 66 crore, a large chunk has been earmarked by the HRD ministry for the six new IITs started last year.

“The plan is to release funds for the two new IIT starting this year after the new government that comes finalises the budget for this financial year,” an official said.

But government sources accepted that it was unprecedented for new institutions of excellence to start in their first year without any dedicated funding at all.

Last year, Rs 60 crore was spent on the six new IITs — the new institutes and their mentor IITs complained the amount was inadequate.

“If that amount was inadequate, imagine what we face now.… Mentoring new IITs is fine, but funding them isn’t our job. This is grossly unfair,” an IIT official said.

Particularly so, the IITs argue, because they themselves are struggling with a shortage of funds.

In addition to government funding, the IITs maintain a corpus built from earnings through consultancies with the private sector. This corpus is meant for emergencies, but the institutes have over the past few years had to dip into it to fund their day-to-day expenditure.

IIT Bombay had last year written to the HRD ministry specifically complaining that it was struggling to even pay its faculty their salaries.

The government’s inability to release funds for the new IITs starting this year and its dependence on the mentor institutes to bail it out of trouble reinforces concerns also expressed by the Indian Institutes of Management.

The government has announced six new IIMs that are to start during the 11th five-year plan. It is keen that the existing IIMs handhold the new ones like the mentor IITs. But the IIMs have repeatedly expressed fears that they will be saddled with financial obligations towards the new IIMs, apart from a mentoring role.