HRD Ministry calls a special meeting of IIT Council

New Delhi, June 22 (ANI): The Human Resource and Development (HRD) Ministry has called for a special meeting of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Council on June 27. "The uncertainty faced by the student community, consequent to the resolutions of the senates of IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi, requires to be addressed. Consequently, a special meeting of the IIT Council is being convened on 27.6.2012," said a HRD Ministry release. Rejecting HRD Minister Kapil Sibal's single entrance test proposal, IIT-Delhi has decided to conduct its own entrance exam from next year, following in the footsteps of IIT-Kanpur. Prof. Atul Kumar Mittal of Civil Engineering Department at IIT earlier on Thursday termed the Centre's policy as an impeachment on the autonomy of IITs across the country. "The main reasons are whatever resolution has been adopted by the IIT Delhi Senate on May 2, those resolutions have been rejected by the IIT Council in their meeting on May 12 and 28 May, which we felt is not correct and that is why IIT Delhi Senate rightly has rejected the Council's proposal and IIT Delhi's Senate feels that it is an impeachment on our autonomy," said Prof. Mittal. "So, it is a broader issue of the autonomy of our IIT system. And then we say what is the way forward, the way forward is that IIT will conduct its own exam, so we have decided that we will conduct our own exam," he added. Prof. Sanjeev Sangrini, also of IIT Delhi, on his part said that the proposal of the government was an illogical decision as such the IITs would conduct their examinations similar to the previous years. "So the Senate decided that enough is enough; whatever proposals we had put through, they were not acceded, whatever we had said and the proposal, which came, was a half way proposal, which had a lot of difficulties in implementation and the worse part was that there was insistence that this should be put into effect to 2013; we believe that if this would have been put into effect from 2013 then there would have been lot of problems, when the decision would have been implemented. Also it was an unsound decision," said Prof. Sangrini. "So, we decided we will not abide by that and what we have done is that we will conduct our exam similar to the exam last time. Now for children who may be confused that how many exams they will have to give, we have also decided that we will get in touch with other IITs, who would not like to follow the Council's resolution and we will join hands with them and have an exam together with them," he added. IIT Kanpur had early this month rejected the proposed test terming it 'academically and methodically unsound'. The government had on May 28 announced the new test from 2013, under which aspiring candidates for IITs and other central institutes like NITs and IIITs will have to sit under new a format of common entrance test, which will also take plus two board results into consideration. (ANI)