Top Seven IITs to Fix Fee Structures on Their Own

With an aim to improve the global university rankings, top seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will get a free will to devise their own fee structure without consulting the IIT Council. The top seven IITs need to make a presentation on fee structure aspect on October 20, 2022. The seven top IITs include Bombay, Delhi, Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Guwahati and Roorkee.

As part of a larger project called ‘Vishwajeet’, the Board of Governors of each of these seven IITs will fix the fee structure of their institute. Presently, each B.Tech student pays INR 2 lakh per annum. The decision surfaced after none of the IITs made it to the top 200 rankings of Times Higher Education World University Ranking 2022. Only, IIT Bombay managed to feature in the 351-400 ranking group. 

Currently, the fee structure of all IITs is fixed by the IIT Council that comprises of IIT Directors and Board of Governors of each institute, headed by the Union Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister. The project ‘Vishwajeet’ came to existence on August 24 and aims to help the top seven IITs to make it to the top 100 global universities eventually. It is also seen as a means to help solve the issue of fund scarcity in IITs as these institutes spend about INR 6 lakh annually on each student.  

The top seven IITs will have to collect about INR 500 crore by April 2022 and INR 1000 crore by April 2021 to be a part of this project. This will require each institute to choose five crore strength areas including building new hostels, laboratories, hiring international faculties and filling-up of empty faculty positions to ensure specific intervention.

As per an official source, IITs will have to invest systematic efforts to attract contributions in the form of corporate social responsibility funds, alumni contributions and corporate donations.  One of the IIT Directors said, “The project is required as our funding is not sufficient to construct new buildings or labs”.

IIT-Delhi has a crunch of around INR 1000 crore, needed to construct additional infrastructure including hostels and laboratories while IIT Bombay requires funds for research equipments apart from building new hostels.