Senior bureaucrats of the HRD Ministry will soon meet PMO officials to chalk out a plan for enrollment of Pakistani students for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in IITs and IIMs.The offer by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to reserve seats for interested students from the neighbouring country in premier Indian institutions has apparently been viewed quite positively by the Pakistani entourage. If nothing goes wrong, HRD officials said, enrollment for Pakistani students can begin next year itself.Sources said that this would be a great beginning in terms of both IITs and IIMs going seriously international. Till now, the Indian premier institutions have been very conservative about either stepping out and setting up campuses abroad or conceiving plans which would let them have a steady flow of students from countries abroad.The IIMs at least run a number of post-MBA programmes for students from other countries. They have also been holding a number of courses in universities in the West and career training programmes for executives as the one they are conducting now in Cairo, Egypt. The IIT Bombay has just signed an agreement with the National University of Singapore to run special courses in the city-state.A senior official said, ‘‘There are no problems. We obviously will have to hold an admission test. But the nature or the difficulty percentage of that test can be decided in consultation with those who manage professional courses in Pakistan. If they have any problems with our IIT joint entrance or CAT for management courses, we can devise something else that would suit them.’’The number of seats that would be offered in the seven IITs or the six IIMs have not yet been decided.
