New Delhi, Jan. 19: The IITs and other centrally funded higher education institutions face a threat to their autonomy with the government planning to ask them to seek its guidance before entering into any academic collaboration with foreign universities, sources said.

Under a proposal before the human resource development ministry, headed by Smriti Irani, these institutions should seek the foreign ministry's advice (via Irani's ministry) about any planned overseas collaboration.

If South Block clears the move and the institution signs a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with a foreign university for collaboration on joint research or teacher exchange, a copy of the MoU must be sent to Irani's ministry 'for the record'.

Several academics, speaking on condition of anonymity, said such a move would jeopardise the academic freedom granted to these institutions by the acts of Parliament under which they had been set up.

These laws allow the Indian Institutes of Technology, central universities and the National Institutes of Technology to collaborate with foreign universities without seeking the government's guidance.

'It is beyond any logic to ask the institutions to be guided by the government when the act passed by Parliament allows the (central) universities to decide on any collaboration with any institution abroad,' a central university vice-chancellor said.

'Academic collaborations should be decided by academic institutions, not the bureaucracy.'

An IIT teacher said: 'The government may issue some general advisory for collaboration but micro-monitoring each MoU is not in the spirit of promoting academic excellence. Why should the IITs send their MoUs to the ministry 'for the record'?' he said.

His fear was that even if the foreign office cleared a collaboration proposal, the human resource development ministry would later run a check on every clause in every MoU to monitor the institution's plans and activities.

The ball was apparently set rolling at a conference of central university vice-chancellors in Chandigarh last September. There, Irani had asked the VCs to send copies of the MoUs their institutions had signed for overseas academic collaboration in the past 20-25 years.

An internal note under discussion in the ministry says that according to the Constitution of India, partnerships with foreign institutions that involve spending by the Indian partner have to be routed through the central government.

'In order to have (a) uniform system that encourages global partnership(s) within the framework of (the) national interest, it is important to be guided by the (foreign ministry) with regard to nations with which collaborations can be sought,' the note says.

Sources said that apart from getting the foreign office to vet every application for overseas academic collaboration, Irani's ministry might request South Block to provide it with regularly updated general guidelines for such partnerships.

The IITs, India's premier tech schools with a global brand, now collaborate academically with over 500 overseas institutions.

Section 6(1)(I) of the Institute of Technology Act 1961, under which the IITs were set up, says: 'Every institute shall exercise the following powers and perform the duties, namely, to cooperate with educational or other institutions in any part of the world having objects wholly or partly similar to those of the institute by exchange of teachers and scholars and generally in such manner as may be conducive to their common objects.'

Section 6(1)(I) of the NIT Act 2007 gives a similar right to these engineering colleges.

Section 6(1)(x) of the Central Universities Act 2009 empowers these institutions 'to cooperate or collaborate or associate with any other university or authority or institution of higher learning, including those located outside the country, in such manner and for such purposes as the university may determine'.

Under the existing laws, centrally funded institutions are not allowed to set up campuses abroad but institutions like the Indian Institutes of Management, which are not governed by any act, can do so with permission from the human resource development and foreign ministries.