New Delhi,May 27: The government on Tuesday announced the names of directors of six new IITs five months after TOI first reported the matter.
While U B Desai will be director of IIT, Hyderabad, M K Surappa will head the one in Ropar. Sudhir Kumar Jain will head the one in Gandhinagar, Madhusudan Chakraborty in Bhubaneswar and Anil Bhowmick in Patna. Prem Kumar Kalra will be the director of the IIT located in Rajasthan.
HRD ministry sources said that the Cabinet clearance has been secured and the new directors have been given the appointment letters.
The IIT Council had cleared their appointment in January but they could not be appointed without cabinet approval.
Two new IITs – in Mandi (Himachal Pradesh) and in Indore (Madhya Pradesh) – will also start functioning this year.
The government has also decided that except the IIT in Rajasthan, the IITs will start functioning from their own temporary campus from this academic session.
The new IITs are being mentored by the old IITs whereby students of new institutes were also accommodated by old ones. Directors of the IITs were made acting directors of the new ones.
IIT Bhubaneswar and IIT Punjab, which are functioning at their mentoring IITs in Kharagpur and Delhi at present, will be shifted to their own campuses from the coming academic session.
Three others – IIT Hyderabad, IIT Gandhinagar and IIT Patna – are already functioning from temporary campuses. However, IIT Kanpur will have to continue to mentor IIT Rajasthan as the state government has not yet finalized the town where it will be located.