New Delhi: Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) standing committee, the supreme decision-making body of IITs, has recommended a hike of 80% or Rs 40,000 in annual tuition fees for IIT undergraduate (UG) programmes. As per sources, the committee proposed the fee hike in a meeting held, recently. If this recommendation is realized, the annual fees would increase to Rs 90,000.
However, an official source informed that the IIT Council, headed by the human resource development minister, will take up the matter forth when the next meeting will be held. The next council meeting is anticipated to be held on January 7, 2012. The Standing Committee is an administrative sub-group of the IIT Council, comprising the directors of all IITs, and advises the Ministry and the Council on matters of common interest to all institutions in the system.
According to sources, though the committee has proposed an 80% increase in fees, students from the weaker sections, such as scheduled castes (SC) and scheduled tribes (ST) and OBCs, would not be required to pay the higher fee. The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a group of autonomous public engineering institutes of higher education.
The IITs are governed by the Institutes of Technology Act, 1961 which has declared them as “institutions of national importance” and lays down their powers, duties, framework for governance etc. There are a total 16 IITs in the country, namely, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, IIT Bhubaneswar, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Gandhinagar, IIT Guwahati, IIT Hyderabad, IIT Indore, IIT Kanpur, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Madras, IIT Mandi, IIT Patna, IIT Jodhpur, IIT Roorkee, and IIT Ropar.
