New Delhi, April 11: The new Indian Institutes of Technology and an Indian Institute of Management starting classes this year will implement the entire 27 per cent OBC quota this academic session, top government officials have said.

The decision is likely to reduce the number of general category seats that were to be made available at the new IITs — in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan — and the IIM in Shillong, the officials told The Telegraph.

Although the human resource development ministry is yet to finalise the locations of two of these three IITs, it has decided that the quota must be implemented at these institutes in the coming academic session, sources said.

A spot near Hyderabad has been picked for the Andhra Pradesh IIT, but the HRD ministry and the governments of Rajasthan and Bihar are at loggerheads over finalising sites.

While the site Bihar picked suffers from waterlogging, the ministry considers the Rajasthan government’s choice — Kota — “too far from a major city”.

“The OBC reservation will have to come from the 200 students to be admitted. We cannot accommodate any more students this year,” an Andhra government official working on the new IIT said.

Each of the new IITs is to admit 200 students this year, with a regular increase in intake over the next six years.

The Rajiv Gandhi IIM in Shillong — the first of the elite B-schools to be named after someone — plans to take in 60 students this year.

Till yesterday’s Supreme Court judgment clearing the way for the OBC quota in higher education, 155 students from the general category and 45 from the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were slated to enter each new IIT this year.

Now, the general category seats are likely to drop at each of the new IITs to 101.

At IIM Shillong, 46 general category and 14 SC/ST students were to be admitted this year. Now, the general category seats are likely to dwindle to 30.

Last year, the government had released only Rs 1 lakh out of the Rs 80 crore allocated for setting up the three new IITs. This year, Rs 50 crore has been earmarked.

“The funds we received were intended to deal with 200 seats. If we are to introduce the 27 per cent OBC quota this year without affecting general category seats, we will need to increase our total seats by 54 per cent,” a Bihar government official said.

For this, the new IITs would now each need to accept 308 students, as opposed to 200. This, the Bihar official said, would need “54 per cent more funds”.

Officials in the HRD ministry conceded that with the Union budget for the year finalised, increasing funds for the new IITs and IIM was “almost impossible”.