New Delhi, Dec. 16: The Centre is backtracking on its promise to open 10 new National Institutes of Technology across the country in order to accommodate an institution requested by the family of a late Bengal Congress leader.
The human resource development ministry has decided to open nine new NITs instead of 10, replacing the tenth with an institute to be named after A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhury.
The Union cabinet approved the Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute of Engineering and Technology on November 20, allocating Rs 97 crore for the project.
The institute will be based in Malda, the late Congress leader’s bastion.
However, the government did not indicate that setting up this institute would require it to go back on its promise of 10 new NITs — a promise that was repeated by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh even on November 30.
Now, The Telegraph has learnt, a cash-strapped government has quietly decided to scrap one NIT to accommodate the institute named after Choudhury without spending more.
The decision comes at a time states are clashing with the Centre over the share of NIT seats for their students. The 10 institutes, committed in the eleventh five-year plan, were aimed at ensuring that students from states traditionally backward in technical education would also receive adequate seats.
The plan was to place them in states that do not already have an NIT. Bengal already has an NIT in Durgapur.
The Centre is yet to decide which state will lose out because of the Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute.
Unlike the NITs, which have a national character and admit students from across the country, the Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute will primarily cater to local students, sources said.
“It will not be an NIT and will not even be run like one. The idea, pushed by the late Congress leader’s family, was not to have a national institution but a memorial to Choudhury. And that’s what this institute will be,” a source close to HRD minister Arjun Singh said.
Planned amendments to the NIT Act, required to recognise degrees offered by the new NITs, will only mention nine of them, the source said. The Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute will not be run by a central law.
Choudhury’s family members, it is learnt, have met Arjun at least twice to urge him to start the institute. A source in the Prime Minister’s Office confirmed that it, too, had been petitioned by the family.
The HRD ministry initially attempted to start the Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute in addition to the 10 NITs, the sources said.
The institute was, however placed ahead of the NITs in the queue of institutes to be launched — a move that was opposed by the finance ministry.
“Ordinarily, the finance ministry opposition would have stalled any such move. After all, we never promised the institute, so there was no reason to create a controversy by pushing the institute further,” a veteran in the finance ministry said.
But the HRD ministry, the sources said, decided instead to propose the Ghani Khan Choudhary Institute in place of one NIT.
The Prime Minister made the promise for the NITs in his speech during the cash-for-votes fiasco in Parliament in July, while replying to Opposition leader L.K. Advani. He repeated the same in his Independence Day speech and then at a rally in Jaipur on November 30.
