Hyderabad, April 23: Y S Rajasekhara Reddy’s grand idea of taking IT education to rural students’ doorstep is set for a major blow with the state Cabinet on Thursday giving its nod to a cutback of 3,000 seats in the state-run Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs). There’s simply no money to run them as planned.
There are 6,000 seats in the three IIITs located at Nuzvid, Idupulapaya and Basara. The Andhra Pradesh State Council for Higher Education (APSCHE) has been mulling a reduction in the number of seats for some time as the finance department is unable to rake together enough money for the institutes this year.
To run the institutes as per plan, it costs the government Rs 1.5 lakh per student. The students themselves pay only Rs 6,000 per annum for the six-year integrated programme, and they get a free laptop to boot.
Last year, the government budgeted Rs 600 crore for the IIITs but actually disbursed only Rs 240 crore.
This year, the allocation has been slashed to Rs 100 crore. That’s a far cry from the Rs 900 crore sunk into the institutes in the first year of operation, 2008. Being a project that the then chief minister took a shine to, funds were eagerly devoted to the institutes, even if other universities were being told to use their block grants to pay salaries.
–Agencies