New Delhi, Nov. 4: Students scrambling to get into private coaching centres to crack engineering entrance exams are in for a windfall.

Come January 2017, study materials put together by the IITs to help aspirants clear tests like the JEE-Main and JEE-Advanced are set to be telecast via direct-to-home educational channels and also posted online.

Under the proposed IIT-Professor Assisted Learning (IIT-PAL) scheme, TV channels devoted to physics, chemistry, mathematics and biology will be started by the government, with 200 hours of lectures on each subject.

The lectures, by teachers of IITs and Kendriya Vidyalayas, will also be available online. Students will have the option of posting queries, which will be answered by experts from the IITs.

"In private coaching, students are taught tricks on how to crack entrance tests. We will explain the concepts so that they understand and crack the test," Ramgopal Rao, the director of IIT Delhi that will be in the forefront of the initiative, told reporters.

Last year, a committee led by IIT Roorkee chairperson Ashok Mishra had said that coaching was a very lucrative "industry" that generated revenue of approximately Rs 24,000 crore per year. It had also recommended regulation of coaching institutions but no action has been taken yet.

Rao said the IITs were not in competition with private coaching centres to attract students but would help needy aspirants realise their dream of making it into premier tech schools and other top institutions.

"Even if a hundred students in rural areas use our material, it will be an achievement for us," he said.

There will be lectures by some 40 Kendriya Vidyalayas teachers and about 100 IIT faculty members. They will be based on NCERT textbooks for Classes XI and XII.

Rao said the older IITs would increase seats at the PhD level. At present, there are 2,500 PhD students in IIT Delhi. The target is to increase seats to about 5,000 in the next three to four years.