The government has devised a shortcut arrangement to circumvent the delay in appointing chairpersons to NITs.

Last week, the apex body of the NITs headed by education minister Dharmendra Pradhan decided that the IIT representative on the board of governors (BoGs) of each NIT with a vacancy at the top would act as the chairperson. The job of the NIT chairperson is to preside over meetings of the BoG of the institute.

The BoG takes decisions on policy issues, development activities, academic expansion, research and innovation.

Some of the NITs, including the one at Bhopal, do not have chairpersons. The government has been delaying appointments to key positions in the top institutions.

“Sometimes, the appointment process takes longer than usual. The institute should not suffer during this period. Hence, the NIT Council took the decision that the IIT representative would preside over the meeting of the BoG of every NIT without a chairperson so that the decision-making process is not affected,” said an NIT director.

Till now, the government had been assigning the responsibility of holding BoG meetings to the chairperson of another NIT. For example, NIT Meghalaya chairperson Sunil Alagh was given additional responsibility of NIT Jamshedpur in July 2025.

A former NIT director said the posts were being kept vacant because the government wanted to appoint people on the basis of ideology.

“There is no dearth of capable persons. But the government looks at the profiles of persons and scans their background and political ideology. This narrow approach limits the number of possible candidates for key posts in institutions,” he said.

In November 2025, the government took the approval of the Visitor, the President of India, and extended the tenure of the chairpersons of the IITs at BHU, Dhanbad, Guwahati, Bhubaneswar, Palakkad and Jammu. The education ministry also gave additional charge of chairperson of the IITs in Goa, Roorkee and Patna to the incumbent chairpersons of the IITs in Ropar, Delhi and Kharagpur, respectively. This ad hoc arrangement will continue until the last week of May 2026.