The Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) is approaching the end of its 150th anniversary but the mood on the campus is downbeat over the delay in its proposed upgrade.

The closure ceremony of the year-long celebration, scheduled for November 23, has been deferred till December 21. “We are in no mood to celebrate. We were expecting a declaration from the Centre on the proposed upgrade that would befit this 150-year-old institution,” said N.R. Bandopadhyaya, a senior teacher of the institute.

The upgrade is now tied in a legal knot. The Centre has principally agreed to upgrade Besu to an Indian Institute of Engineering, Science and Technology (IIEST), but the state’s demand that half the seats be reserved for students from Bengal seems to have prompted it into bringing the Shibpur campus within the ambit of an amended NIT Act.

The Centre wants to include four other institutes within the act, which allows for 50 per cent reservation for students from the respective states.

But teachers at Besu, backed by the state higher education department, do not want to be clubbed with the NITs, which are primarily undergraduate technical institutes. They want a separate central act for the upgrade.

“The Centre-appointed Anandakrishnan Committee, which had recommended the upgrade of Besu to an IIEST, has suggested a separate act of Parliament for institutes like ours that will focus on postgraduate education and research,” said Bandopadhyay.

State higher education minister Sudarshan Ray Choudhuri on November 6 had shot off a letter to Union human resources minister Arjun Singh, asking for a separate act for the IIESTs. Ray Choudhuri said Kerala education minister M.A. Baby, too, had written to the Centre, asking for a separate act for the Cochin University of Science and Technology that is up for upgrade.

At Besu, the sesquicentenary celebrations will come to an end on December 21. C.N.R. Rao, the scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, will be conferred with an honorary D.Sc degree by the university.