Bhubaneswar, May 24: The state government will write back to the Centre tomorrow to send a team to Sambalpur to finalise the location for the proposed Indian Institute of Management (IIM).

This comes after the Centtre said no admission to the proposed IIM-Bhubaneswar would take place for the 2015-16 academic session if the location was not finalised.

"The department will urge the Centre to send its site selection team to Sambalpur at the earliest," the state's technical education minister Sanjay Das Burma said, adding that his department had received a letter from the Union human resources development department on Saturday.

"No admission can take place from the temporary campus from this academic session unless the site for permanent campus is finalised," the letter said.

Though the site selection committee had agreed in January to have the temporary campus of the IIM on the premises of the International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) in Bhubaneswar, the location of the permanent campus is yet to be finalised.

Following the norms of the Centre that the IIM should be located within "one-hour distance" from an airport, the state government had suggested two sites near Bhubaneswar to the Centre. A site selection committee had visited the two sites and had favoured the site near the IIIT at Gothapatna.

Subsequently, acting on a petition from the residents of Sambalpur, Union human resources development minister Smriti Irani wrote to the chief minister in March seeking the views of the government as to whether the IIM could be set up in Sambalpur.

In his reply, Naveen had strongly favoured the establishment of the IIM in Sambalpur.