New Delhi: The Indian Institutes of Technology on Monday made a push to admit more foreign students and recruit foreign teachers to permanent posts, the idea being to try and improve the tech schools' international rankings.

Each of these institutes will from now on be free to decide what fee to charge its foreign students, the tech schools' top decision-making body, the IIT Council, decided on Monday.

This will allow the individual IITs to reduce the fee for foreign students from the current, across-the-board rate of Rs 6 lakh a year.

The institutes want to lower the fee to the same level that their Indian students pay, three members of the IIT Council, headed by Union human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar, told The Telegraph.

A council member said that the premier institutes' "international rankings are affected" because of the low enrolment of foreign students and the negligible recruitment of foreign teachers.

"We do not get foreign students for the BTech courses because we require all undergraduate students to clear the JEE Advanced, which foreign students from the neighbouring countries are reluctant to do," a council member said.

"They are, however, interested in earning MTech degrees from the IITs but say the course fee is too high."

Before 2017-18, the institutes charged students from the Saarc countries $2,000 (about Rs 1.3 lakh) a year for BTech and MTech courses while those from other foreign countries had to pay $4,000.

Under the ministry's instructions, the institutes adopted a uniform fee of Rs 6 lakh a year for all foreign students from the 2017-18 session.

The ministry decision was intended to link the tuition fees paid by all foreign students to the institutes' operational costs, which has been determined to be Rs 6-7 lakh for each MTech student.

Indian students currently pay Rs 2 lakh a year for BTech courses and about Rs 50,000 a year for MTech courses.

An IIT Bombay teacher said the ministry wanted the tech schools to become self-sustaining, with the tuition fee paid by foreign students as a major source of revenue.

The council also decided that Javadekar's ministry would seek a relaxation to the Citizenship Act to allow the IITs to recruit foreign teachers as permanent faculty members. The Citizenship Act denies permanent jobs to foreigners in public institutions.

"There are certain restrictions in hiring foreign faculty. We will take the matter up with the home and foreign ministries," Javadekar said.

Home ministry policy allows short-term employment visas to foreign teachers, who can be engaged as assistant professors for five years but only if they stand to get salaries of $15,000 (Rs 10.4 lakh) a year or more.

Another council decision was that the ministry would ask the public-sector undertakings to complete their recruitment process by July every year to check the vacancy of MTech seats at the IITs.

The PSUs recruit around September-October when the IITs have already admitted their students. Nearly 30 to 50 per cent students in the key branches of engineering in the IITs and the National Institutes of Technology quit their courses for the PSU jobs. At that point, the institutes have hardly any opportunity to fill up the vacated seats.

Earlier this year, the department of public enterprise had written to all the ministries that have PSUs to ask them to ensure their recruitment process does not overlap with the IIT and NIT admission process.